At a secret location high above Brooklyn, a pair of cameras steadily capture pictures of Manhattan every ten seconds, checking building “burps” (unexpected increases in emissions) in order to learn more about how New York City works.

In shared space at Google’s office in SoHo graduate students are creating new apps that cull information from social media to alert reports to newsworthy events, while at MTA headquarters in Brooklyn, budding data engineers collaborate with city agencies and industries to use big data to solve big urban problems.

And on a sliver of land between Manhattan and Queens, university officials are trying to invent new kinds of buildings flexible enough to meet demands for space and computing power that no one can anticipate.

This is what New York City’s Applied Sciences schools are creating, some three years after the announcement of the first campus. Both Cornell Tech, a collaboration between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion, and NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress graduated their first master’s degree classes earlier this spring. Joining Cornell Tech, CUSP, and Columbia University’s Institute for Data Science and Engineering, a fourth applied sciences campus will bring students from Carnegie Mellon’s Integrative Media Program to Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy yard next fall.

New York City’s tech sector has enjoyed significant growth since the end of the Great Recession, with the number of jobs up by one-third and venture capital dollars doubling. The Applied Sciences effort is too new to have either contributed meaningfully to this surge or to fill the urgent demand for engineers —the permanent campuses won’t be completed for several more years and the graduating classes so far have been tiny—but it’s an important part of the emerging technology industry in the city. As one tech leader explained earlier this year in an article in Capital New York magazine, “The announcement of the Cornell Tech center clearly was a major catalyst in focusing attention on the New York tech ecosystem.” A New York venture capitalist similarly commented, “Schools play an important long term roll in the growth of the talent pool, but it’s not as directly related as ‘See, a school opened up, let’s start a company or let’s move.’ It’s all positive and moves the ecosystem forward.”

But the point of Applied Sciences was not just to feed the tech ecosystem right now, but instead to invent and advance industries decades in the future. The cameras looking at emissions in downtown and midtown Manhattan (which will soon have counterparts in other cities across the world) are gathering data to help researchers and eventually entrepreneurs better understand how cities work, so that they can solve big problems down the road. It’s not just about the next urban app but about inventing things that people can barely imagine.

The seeds planted in immediate response to the Great Recession and the dearth of federal leadership will bear fruit decades in the future—whether that’s new technology development in New York, or a rising generation of immigrant leaders in Houston, or a massive transit investment in Denver. That’s why we believe that the “Metropolitan Revolution” represents a major change in the economy and politics of our nation. And in the meantime, there’s so much to learn about those burping buildings.

Authors

At a secret location high above Brooklyn, a pair of cameras steadily capture pictures of Manhattan every ten seconds, checking building “burps” (unexpected increases in emissions) in order to learn more about how New York City works.

In shared space at Google’s office in SoHo graduate students are creating new apps that cull information from social media to alert reports to newsworthy events, while at MTA headquarters in Brooklyn, budding data engineers collaborate with city agencies and industries to use big data to solve big urban problems.

And on a sliver of land between Manhattan and Queens, university officials are trying to invent new kinds of buildings flexible enough to meet demands for space and computing power that no one can anticipate.

This is what New York City’s Applied Sciences schools are creating, some three years after the announcement of the first campus. Both Cornell Tech, a collaboration between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion, and NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress graduated their first master’s degree classes earlier this spring. Joining Cornell Tech, CUSP, and Columbia University’s Institute for Data Science and Engineering, a fourth applied sciences campus will bring students from Carnegie Mellon’s Integrative Media Program to Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy yard next fall.

New York City’s tech sector has enjoyed significant growth since the end of the Great Recession, with the number of jobs up by one-third and venture capital dollars doubling. The Applied Sciences effort is too new to have either contributed meaningfully to this surge or to fill the urgent demand for engineers —the permanent campuses won’t be completed for several more years and the graduating classes so far have been tiny—but it’s an important part of the emerging technology industry in the city. As one tech leader explained earlier this year in an article in Capital New York magazine, “The announcement of the Cornell Tech center clearly was a major catalyst in focusing attention on the New York tech ecosystem.” A New York venture capitalist similarly commented, “Schools play an important long term roll in the growth of the talent pool, but it’s not as directly related as ‘See, a school opened up, let’s start a company or let’s move.’ It’s all positive and moves the ecosystem forward.”

But the point of Applied Sciences was not just to feed the tech ecosystem right now, but instead to invent and advance industries decades in the future. The cameras looking at emissions in downtown and midtown Manhattan (which will soon have counterparts in other cities across the world) are gathering data to help researchers and eventually entrepreneurs better understand how cities work, so that they can solve big problems down the road. It’s not just about the next urban app but about inventing things that people can barely imagine.

The seeds planted in immediate response to the Great Recession and the dearth of federal leadership will bear fruit decades in the future—whether that’s new technology development in New York, or a rising generation of immigrant leaders in Houston, or a massive transit investment in Denver. That’s why we believe that the “Metropolitan Revolution” represents a major change in the economy and politics of our nation. And in the meantime, there’s so much to learn about those burping buildings.

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won’t, or can’t, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders–mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists–are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they’re investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a priority, and equipping workers with the skills they need.

In The Metropolitan Revolution,Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight success stories and the people behind them.

More on The Metropolitan Revolution

New York City: Efforts are under way to diversify the city’s vast economy

Portland: Is selling the “sustainability” solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world

Northeast Ohio: Groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes

Houston: Modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder

Miami: Innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations

Denverand Los Angeles: Leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises

Boston and Detroit: Innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century

The lessons in this book can help other cities meet their challenges. Change is happening, and every community in the country can benefit. Change happens where we live, and if leaders won’t do it, citizens should demand it.

The Metropolitan Revolution was named the 2014 Bronze Winner in Political Science fromForeword Review's IndieFab Awards.

Praise for The Metropolitan Revolution:

“The Metropolitan Revolution upends conventional wisdom and makes the case for how our cities and metros are leading American change and progress: they are transforming our national economy, political conversation, and collective destiny from the bottom up like never before. A must-read for anyone working toward a brighter future for our cities and our nation.” —Mayor Cory Booker

“The Metropolitan Revolution builds on twenty years of studying metropolitan areas and hundreds of thousands of miles traveling to them around the globe, and the result is an exciting guide to the new world economy - urban, networked, innovative, collaborative, and driven by human potential.”
—Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry G. Cisneros

“Being mayor of Chicago is the best job I’ve ever had in public life. Katz and Bradley totally get it: the real power to change America lies in our cities and metros.”
—Mayor Rahm Emanuel

“With paralysis in Washington, public policy solutions will come from successful metropolitan regions, the clinical trials of our future. We are well into this journey, but never has it been explained with such insight and analysis until The Metropolitan Revolution.”
—Governor Jon Huntsman

“Just when ‘by the people, for the people’ seems like an anachronism, cities are giving it new meaning, fueled by twenty-first century technology. Every citizen needs to understand the metropolitan revolution. If we change cities, we change the country.”
—Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America

“This book captures the energy and excitement bubbling up in cities across America. This is ‘do it yourself’ urbanism of the highest order, and it is altering our landscape and our country.”
—Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation

“Through real-world examples, The Metropolitan Revolution brings to life how America's cities and suburbs drive innovation to solve problems and seize opportunities. This book is a call to action beyond Washington, where metro leaders join together and simply get stuff done.”
—Mayor Scott Smith

“The Metropolitan Revolution is compelling reading on how our federal system is a powerful advantage in global competitiveness. This book is indispensable for business and elected leaders on realizing the economic potential of metropolitan areas for their citizens and the country.”
—Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won’t, or can’t, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders–mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists–are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they’re investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a priority, and equipping workers with the skills they need.

In The Metropolitan Revolution,Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight success stories and the people behind them.

More on The Metropolitan Revolution

New York City: Efforts are under way to diversify the city’s vast economy

Portland: Is selling the “sustainability” solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world

Northeast Ohio: Groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes

Houston: Modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder

Miami: Innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations

Denverand Los Angeles: Leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises

Boston and Detroit: Innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century

The lessons in this book can help other cities meet their challenges. Change is happening, and every community in the country can benefit. Change happens where we live, and if leaders won’t do it, citizens should demand it.

The Metropolitan Revolution was named the 2014 Bronze Winner in Political Science fromForeword Review's IndieFab Awards.

Praise for The Metropolitan Revolution:

“The Metropolitan Revolution upends conventional wisdom and makes the case for how our cities and metros are leading American change and progress: they are transforming our national economy, political conversation, and collective destiny from the bottom up like never before. A must-read for anyone working toward a brighter future for our cities and our nation.”
—Mayor Cory Booker

“The Metropolitan Revolution builds on twenty years of studying metropolitan areas and hundreds of thousands of miles traveling to them around the globe, and the result is an exciting guide to the new world economy - urban, networked, innovative, collaborative, and driven by human potential.”
—Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry G. Cisneros

“Being mayor of Chicago is the best job I’ve ever had in public life. Katz and Bradley totally get it: the real power to change America lies in our cities and metros.”
—Mayor Rahm Emanuel

“With paralysis in Washington, public policy solutions will come from successful metropolitan regions, the clinical trials of our future. We are well into this journey, but never has it been explained with such insight and analysis until The Metropolitan Revolution.”
—Governor Jon Huntsman

“Just when ‘by the people, for the people’ seems like an anachronism, cities are giving it new meaning, fueled by twenty-first century technology. Every citizen needs to understand the metropolitan revolution. If we change cities, we change the country.”
—Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America

“This book captures the energy and excitement bubbling up in cities across America. This is ‘do it yourself’ urbanism of the highest order, and it is altering our landscape and our country.”
—Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation

“Through real-world examples, The Metropolitan Revolution brings to life how America's cities and suburbs drive innovation to solve problems and seize opportunities. This book is a call to action beyond Washington, where metro leaders join together and simply get stuff done.”
—Mayor Scott Smith

“The Metropolitan Revolution is compelling reading on how our federal system is a powerful advantage in global competitiveness. This book is indispensable for business and elected leaders on realizing the economic potential of metropolitan areas for their citizens and the country.”
—Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2014/09/30-houston-english-skills-bradley?rssid=bradleyj{F571340B-484B-41D2-8F0B-7EDEEE326E7B}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/75843006/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~Learning-English-and-Leadership-in-HoustonLearning English and Leadership in Houston

Houston is America on demographic fast-forward. In the first decade of this century, the metro area’s foreign-born population grew 48 percent, compared to 28 percent for the nation as a whole. More than 42 percent of Houston’s children have at least one foreign-born parent, compared with a national rate of 23 percent.

Not surprisingly, Houston also has one of the highest numbers of limited English proficient (LEP) residents of any metro in the nation, ranking 5th among large metropolitan areas. Over two-thirds of LEP residents in the region are in the workforce, but typically earn only about $25,000 a year.

As Jill Wilson explains in her new paper, these workers, and their children, will account for almost all workforce growth in the coming decades, not just in Houston but in the nation as a whole. Realizing how much depends on the success of these families, public, philanthropic, private and civic actors are collaborating to expand access to English-language education, and thereby bolster earnings for families and create better outcomes for children.

Neighborhood Centers, Inc., which Bruce Katz and I have written about previously, is helping LEP residents of the greater Houston region, including in suburbs where community self-perception and public services have not always caught up with demographic realities. Neighborhood Centers is one of the largest nonprofit service providers in the country, operating throughout the state of Texas, but its work is concentrated in community centers located throughout the sprawling Houston metropolis. One of those centers is in Pasadena, a once middle-class white suburb that now has a 20 percent poverty rate and is two-thirds Hispanic.

In 2006, Neighborhood Centers uncovered a huge gap in Pasadena between demand for English language classes and their availability (something Wilson notes is common). According to Pasadena resident Roberta Leal, who I interviewed early last year for the book The Metropolitan Revolution, “Harris County [public school officials] were saying, ‘We have the capacity to host the classes, we just can’t get to the people.’ On the other hand, Neighborhood Centers is saying ‘We have the people, we need the resources, the instructors. Let’s meet in the middle, let’s make this happen.’” Today Neighborhood Centers coordinates a substantial adult education and English language program in Pasadena.

This effort can provide tangible benefits to families and communities: Wilson’s paper documents an earnings premium of between 24 and 39 percent (depending on educational attainment) for English proficient workers versus LEP workers. “In some cases,” she notes, “better English proficiency is associated with more of a difference in earnings than is higher educational attainment.”

But there are also benefits that defy easy quantification. Leal, whose mother learned English at a Neighborhood Centers program in Pasadena, then taught other LEP immigrants at the same community center, says that offering English language instruction sends a strong message to immigrants in particular. “It says we’re not upset that you came to this country and you don’t speak English. It says, we’re glad you came here, come to our home, we can teach you something new and get you out into the community to be your own leader.”

Authors

Houston is America on demographic fast-forward. In the first decade of this century, the metro area’s foreign-born population grew 48 percent, compared to 28 percent for the nation as a whole. More than 42 percent of Houston’s children have at least one foreign-born parent, compared with a national rate of 23 percent.

Not surprisingly, Houston also has one of the highest numbers of limited English proficient (LEP) residents of any metro in the nation, ranking 5th among large metropolitan areas. Over two-thirds of LEP residents in the region are in the workforce, but typically earn only about $25,000 a year.

As Jill Wilson explains in her new paper, these workers, and their children, will account for almost all workforce growth in the coming decades, not just in Houston but in the nation as a whole. Realizing how much depends on the success of these families, public, philanthropic, private and civic actors are collaborating to expand access to English-language education, and thereby bolster earnings for families and create better outcomes for children.

Neighborhood Centers, Inc., which Bruce Katz and I have written about previously, is helping LEP residents of the greater Houston region, including in suburbs where community self-perception and public services have not always caught up with demographic realities. Neighborhood Centers is one of the largest nonprofit service providers in the country, operating throughout the state of Texas, but its work is concentrated in community centers located throughout the sprawling Houston metropolis. One of those centers is in Pasadena, a once middle-class white suburb that now has a 20 percent poverty rate and is two-thirds Hispanic.

In 2006, Neighborhood Centers uncovered a huge gap in Pasadena between demand for English language classes and their availability (something Wilson notes is common). According to Pasadena resident Roberta Leal, who I interviewed early last year for the book The Metropolitan Revolution, “Harris County [public school officials] were saying, ‘We have the capacity to host the classes, we just can’t get to the people.’ On the other hand, Neighborhood Centers is saying ‘We have the people, we need the resources, the instructors. Let’s meet in the middle, let’s make this happen.’” Today Neighborhood Centers coordinates a substantial adult education and English language program in Pasadena.

This effort can provide tangible benefits to families and communities: Wilson’s paper documents an earnings premium of between 24 and 39 percent (depending on educational attainment) for English proficient workers versus LEP workers. “In some cases,” she notes, “better English proficiency is associated with more of a difference in earnings than is higher educational attainment.”

But there are also benefits that defy easy quantification. Leal, whose mother learned English at a Neighborhood Centers program in Pasadena, then taught other LEP immigrants at the same community center, says that offering English language instruction sends a strong message to immigrants in particular. “It says we’re not upset that you came to this country and you don’t speak English. It says, we’re glad you came here, come to our home, we can teach you something new and get you out into the community to be your own leader.”

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/07/22-detroit-bankruptcy-year-later-katz-bradley?rssid=bradleyj{A219731B-7986-4852-894D-A839D07F7A4E}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/69935770/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~A-Year-Later-What-Cities-Can-Learn-from-Detroit%e2%80%99s-BankruptcyA Year Later, What Cities Can Learn from Detroit’s Bankruptcy

Detroit’s recovery shows that cities are networks, not just governments.

One year ago this month, Detroit filed for bankruptcy—the largest U.S. city to take such a step. Since then, Wall Street analysts and the media have focused on how other cities have responded—or failed to respond—to their own pension and health care liabilities. Some have recognized the need to engage unions as partners rather than adversaries, but the broader lesson from Detroit goes far beyond how to avoid bankruptcy.

Detroit’s predicament has revealed three truths for how other cities can start and sustain a recovery.

On Monday, Detroit retirees voted to accept pension cuts as the city continued to get its financial house in order. As hard as this process may be is, it’s only the beginning. Detroit has demonstrated that cities have to set a platform for growth. Market trends are in cities’ favor: In 2011, big cities in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas grew faster than their suburbs for the first time in nearly a century. This reversal continued in 2012 and 2013, possibly signaling a true shift in preferences.

Still, city governments need to fix the basics to signal to both businesses and residents that it’s time to stay (or come back) and invest. For Detroit, fixing the basics hasn’t been easy: The city’s water and sewerage department recently cut off thousands of residential and commercial customers for non-payment with neither sufficient warning nor resources fully in place to help low-income households handle their debts. A two-week moratorium on shut-offs was announced Monday so that residents could learn more about how to get help, and there have also been many positive steps forward.

The city government, for example, gave up control of the neglected (but promising) urban park, Belle Isle, turning it over to state management under a 30-year lease. Through a $185 million bond package, the Detroit Public Lighting Authority is tackling one of the most iconic symbols of the city’s troubles, replacing 55,000 broken streetlights with state-of-the-art LED bulbs. Mayor Mike Duggan has a new effort to stop blight before it starts in Detroit’s healthy neighborhoods by forcing owners to fix up vacant homes and has created a new auction site to find buyers for homes that are vacant or tax delinquent, but still attractive.

Second, Detroit’s recovery shows that cities are networks, not just governments. As Detroit’s government was struggling with fiscal challenges (and the struggles started long before the bankruptcy filing), civic, business and philanthropic actors were committing billions of dollars into downtown and midtown and supporting a smart plan for the city’s physical and economic future. The M1 rail line, which is expected to begin construction later this month, is emblematic of Detroit’s physical and economic transformation. The bulk of the funding is coming not from the federal, state or local governments, but rather a consortium of companies, philanthropies and other anchor institutions.

Similarly, the task force on Detroit’s new innovation district was convened by Mayor Duggan, and will be led by Nancy Schlichting, CEO of the Henry Ford Health System. It will draw on the talents and resources of private, public and civic actors and institutions. A city government can—and must—fix the basics, but it cannot generate economic growth all by itself. It takes a larger group of committed actors to shape a city’s future.

Finally, every metro area has something worth fighting for, rather than fighting over. The Detroit Institute of Arts brought a fractured region together. Back in 2012, suburban voters agreed to tax themselves to support the museum. The dollar amount per household was small, but the symbolic importance was huge, since it showed that suburbanites saw the DIA as a regional, not just city, asset. When it looked like the DIA’s collection would be dismantled to pay the city’s bills, the DIA itself, philanthropies, businesses, and the state of Michigan created what’s termed the “grand bargain” to shore up the city’s pension fund and thereby save the art.

Even with its extraordinary challenges, there is a new spirit, a new civic and political culture that’s unlike what we’ve seen in the city before.

Detroit’s experience has taught the country how a challenged city can be creative and resilient. A year ago pundits warned darkly that there would be a cascade of municipal bankruptcies. But America’s cities proved the doubters wrong: Bankruptcy is not contagious, but revival may well be.

Authors

Detroit’s recovery shows that cities are networks, not just governments.

One year ago this month, Detroit filed for bankruptcy—the largest U.S. city to take such a step. Since then, Wall Street analysts and the media have focused on how other cities have responded—or failed to respond—to their own pension and health care liabilities. Some have recognized the need to engage unions as partners rather than adversaries, but the broader lesson from Detroit goes far beyond how to avoid bankruptcy.

Detroit’s predicament has revealed three truths for how other cities can start and sustain a recovery.

On Monday, Detroit retirees voted to accept pension cuts as the city continued to get its financial house in order. As hard as this process may be is, it’s only the beginning. Detroit has demonstrated that cities have to set a platform for growth. Market trends are in cities’ favor: In 2011, big cities in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas grew faster than their suburbs for the first time in nearly a century. This reversal continued in 2012 and 2013, possibly signaling a true shift in preferences.

Still, city governments need to fix the basics to signal to both businesses and residents that it’s time to stay (or come back) and invest. For Detroit, fixing the basics hasn’t been easy: The city’s water and sewerage department recently cut off thousands of residential and commercial customers for non-payment with neither sufficient warning nor resources fully in place to help low-income households handle their debts. A two-week moratorium on shut-offs was announced Monday so that residents could learn more about how to get help, and there have also been many positive steps forward.

The city government, for example, gave up control of the neglected (but promising) urban park, Belle Isle, turning it over to state management under a 30-year lease. Through a $185 million bond package, the Detroit Public Lighting Authority is tackling one of the most iconic symbols of the city’s troubles, replacing 55,000 broken streetlights with state-of-the-art LED bulbs. Mayor Mike Duggan has a new effort to stop blight before it starts in Detroit’s healthy neighborhoods by forcing owners to fix up vacant homes and has created a new auction site to find buyers for homes that are vacant or tax delinquent, but still attractive.

Second, Detroit’s recovery shows that cities are networks, not just governments. As Detroit’s government was struggling with fiscal challenges (and the struggles started long before the bankruptcy filing), civic, business and philanthropic actors were committing billions of dollars into downtown and midtown and supporting a smart plan for the city’s physical and economic future. The M1 rail line, which is expected to begin construction later this month, is emblematic of Detroit’s physical and economic transformation. The bulk of the funding is coming not from the federal, state or local governments, but rather a consortium of companies, philanthropies and other anchor institutions.

Similarly, the task force on Detroit’s new innovation district was convened by Mayor Duggan, and will be led by Nancy Schlichting, CEO of the Henry Ford Health System. It will draw on the talents and resources of private, public and civic actors and institutions. A city government can—and must—fix the basics, but it cannot generate economic growth all by itself. It takes a larger group of committed actors to shape a city’s future.

Finally, every metro area has something worth fighting for, rather than fighting over. The Detroit Institute of Arts brought a fractured region together. Back in 2012, suburban voters agreed to tax themselves to support the museum. The dollar amount per household was small, but the symbolic importance was huge, since it showed that suburbanites saw the DIA as a regional, not just city, asset. When it looked like the DIA’s collection would be dismantled to pay the city’s bills, the DIA itself, philanthropies, businesses, and the state of Michigan created what’s termed the “grand bargain” to shore up the city’s pension fund and thereby save the art.

Even with its extraordinary challenges, there is a new spirit, a new civic and political culture that’s unlike what we’ve seen in the city before.

Detroit’s experience has taught the country how a challenged city can be creative and resilient. A year ago pundits warned darkly that there would be a cascade of municipal bankruptcies. But America’s cities proved the doubters wrong: Bankruptcy is not contagious, but revival may well be.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2014/06/17-detroit-metro-revolution-katz-bradley?rssid=bradleyj{40F788CA-74D2-480B-BFC3-5318F1319BD8}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/66732471/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~Detroit-Adapting-to-New-Realities-of-Metro-RevolutionDetroit Adapting to New Realities of Metro Revolution

Our book the Metropolitan Revolution, published a year ago today, describes a new normal for governance and economic growth in the United States. The United States Congress, mired in partisan discord, has ceased to perform even basic functions of governance let alone address major national challenges around immigration, competitiveness, climate change and growing inequality. The aging of our population is structurally changing what the federal government even does, with a growing share of spending dedicated to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security squeezing out everything else.

In this vacuum, cities and metros are left to leverage opportunities and tackle challenges themselves—ready or not.

Detroit—yes, Detroit—is one of the places that’s most quickly adapting to this new reality. In the past year, the city has gone far in following the new rules for urban and regional success.

Step one: Leverage your distinctive economy.

Nearly 10 percent of the Detroit metropolitan area’s workforce is employed in R&D intensive, STEM-oriented “advanced industries”—one of the highest concentrations in the nation. Auto manufacturing is one of these industries, but there is also a strong education and health care sector, and a burgeoning digital and creative sector, both concentrated in the Midtown and Downtown neighborhoods that comprise Detroit’s proposed innovation district, announced last week. Startups have outgrown an early downtown tech hub, the 50,000 square foot M@dison building, so they moved into nearby spaces and have christened the area the M@dison block. The New Economy Initiative and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation are fostering a strong ecosystem of big businesses and local suppliers in the proposed innovation district: Benchmark organizations spent $200 million more (a 31 percent jump) on goods and services from local suppliers this year than last.

Step two: Repair your municipal balance sheet.

Like many city governments, successive administrations in Detroit kicked the fiscal can down the road, decade after decade. Bankruptcy was an excruciating way to fix the city’s fiscal problems, but it has given the city government: the ability to restore municipal services to minimal standards, and the discipline, enforced by continued state oversight, to stay out of trouble. New Mayor Mike Duggan champions accountability and performance metrics that will help people understand where their tax dollars go.

Step three: Unlock capital from private and civic institutions.

Non-government actors have been, and continue to be, critical in rebuilding. For example, the linchpin of the proposed bankruptcy settlement is the so-called “grand bargain”: Philanthropies and private businesses contribute $366 million, and the state another $195 million, to limit cuts to city retiree pensions, and thereby preserve the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art, which would have been auctioned to cover city debts. But philanthropies and private sector companies have been shoring up the city for a long time. The Kresge Foundation and other philanthropies like the Ford and Hudson-Webber Foundations along with local businesses are making significant contributions to fund the M1 rail line, which will knit together the innovation district. The New Economy Initiative is supporting local entrepreneurship. Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, the Henry Ford Health System, Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Campusand the College for Creative Studies have invested billions in Downtown and Midtown as well. There is more money available in cities than people think to strengthen the economy–but it’s not necessarily public money.

Step 4: Collaborate to compete.

Within Detroit, and even within the wider southeast Michigan region, people have shown a new willingness to work together. The grand bargain, if it holds together, would be the best example. But it’s not the only one. In 2012, voters in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland Counties agreed to a small property tax bump to support the Detroit Institute of Art. That may not sound like a big deal, but long term collaboration often starts with small steps. The role of the state and federal governments in supporting the city—not just through infusions of cash but also convening and allowing the city flexibility in how it spends existing dollars—are a new model of federalist collaboration between the different levels of government. As part of the proposed innovation district, the mayor charged the leaders of key anchor institutions, philanthropies and corporations to work together to make it happen.

The region still has a way to go, but it has come farther, faster, than anyone would have expected. One local columnist marveled: “All these groups are working together, displaying solidarity and leadership, the way civic fathers do in old-fashioned history books … A region grown infamous for modeling what not to do is showing off courage and commitment, social intelligence and communal generosity.

Detroit is neither perfect nor healed. But its progress in the last year has been remarkable. For the Metropolitan Revolution’s birthday, we’re celebrating Detroit.

The authors thank former New York City Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steel for first articulating the new rules for urban and regional success.

Authors

Our book the Metropolitan Revolution, published a year ago today, describes a new normal for governance and economic growth in the United States. The United States Congress, mired in partisan discord, has ceased to perform even basic functions of governance let alone address major national challenges around immigration, competitiveness, climate change and growing inequality. The aging of our population is structurally changing what the federal government even does, with a growing share of spending dedicated to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security squeezing out everything else.

In this vacuum, cities and metros are left to leverage opportunities and tackle challenges themselves—ready or not.

Detroit—yes, Detroit—is one of the places that’s most quickly adapting to this new reality. In the past year, the city has gone far in following the new rules for urban and regional success.

Step one: Leverage your distinctive economy.

Nearly 10 percent of the Detroit metropolitan area’s workforce is employed in R&D intensive, STEM-oriented “advanced industries”—one of the highest concentrations in the nation. Auto manufacturing is one of these industries, but there is also a strong education and health care sector, and a burgeoning digital and creative sector, both concentrated in the Midtown and Downtown neighborhoods that comprise Detroit’s proposed innovation district, announced last week. Startups have outgrown an early downtown tech hub, the 50,000 square foot M@dison building, so they moved into nearby spaces and have christened the area the M@dison block. The New Economy Initiative and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation are fostering a strong ecosystem of big businesses and local suppliers in the proposed innovation district: Benchmark organizations spent $200 million more (a 31 percent jump) on goods and services from local suppliers this year than last.

Step two: Repair your municipal balance sheet.

Like many city governments, successive administrations in Detroit kicked the fiscal can down the road, decade after decade. Bankruptcy was an excruciating way to fix the city’s fiscal problems, but it has given the city government: the ability to restore municipal services to minimal standards, and the discipline, enforced by continued state oversight, to stay out of trouble. New Mayor Mike Duggan champions accountability and performance metrics that will help people understand where their tax dollars go.

Step three: Unlock capital from private and civic institutions.

Non-government actors have been, and continue to be, critical in rebuilding. For example, the linchpin of the proposed bankruptcy settlement is the so-called “grand bargain”: Philanthropies and private businesses contribute $366 million, and the state another $195 million, to limit cuts to city retiree pensions, and thereby preserve the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art, which would have been auctioned to cover city debts. But philanthropies and private sector companies have been shoring up the city for a long time. The Kresge Foundation and other philanthropies like the Ford and Hudson-Webber Foundations along with local businesses are making significant contributions to fund the M1 rail line, which will knit together the innovation district. The New Economy Initiative is supporting local entrepreneurship. Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, the Henry Ford Health System, Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Campusand the College for Creative Studies have invested billions in Downtown and Midtown as well. There is more money available in cities than people think to strengthen the economy–but it’s not necessarily public money.

Step 4: Collaborate to compete.

Within Detroit, and even within the wider southeast Michigan region, people have shown a new willingness to work together. The grand bargain, if it holds together, would be the best example. But it’s not the only one. In 2012, voters in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland Counties agreed to a small property tax bump to support the Detroit Institute of Art. That may not sound like a big deal, but long term collaboration often starts with small steps. The role of the state and federal governments in supporting the city—not just through infusions of cash but also convening and allowing the city flexibility in how it spends existing dollars—are a new model of federalist collaboration between the different levels of government. As part of the proposed innovation district, the mayor charged the leaders of key anchor institutions, philanthropies and corporations to work together to make it happen.

The region still has a way to go, but it has come farther, faster, than anyone would have expected. One local columnist marveled: “All these groups are working together, displaying solidarity and leadership, the way civic fathers do in old-fashioned history books … A region grown infamous for modeling what not to do is showing off courage and commitment, social intelligence and communal generosity.

Detroit is neither perfect nor healed. But its progress in the last year has been remarkable. For the Metropolitan Revolution’s birthday, we’re celebrating Detroit.

The authors thank former New York City Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steel for first articulating the new rules for urban and regional success.

“More than ever in history, a successful city thrives on the kind of disruption new technology brings,” said New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio last week, but the sentiment has been expressed by many public officials, particularly when they are trying to establish their place’s bona fides as a hub of innovation. But what happens when disruptive technology or business models (Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, General Assembly) meet highly regulated industries (taxi cabs, hotels, education)? How do public officials manage disruption?

Design thinking could help the purposely change-averse parts of the public sector, disruptive businesses (or any businesses, really), and citizens find common ground. Design thinking is a process with many definitions but a few agreed upon steps: define a problem or question; observe potential users to see what they really do and need; use models and pictures to envision solutions; build prototypes and quickly test them to weed out failures before they are locked in and rolled out (healthcare.gov, anyone?); constantly learn and adjust. The approach is messy, collaborative, and, at its best, inspires a spirit of co-creation. In a traditional regulatory approach, by contrast, interactions are tightly structured and one-way, and the resulting regulations are fixed and often cumbersome.

Governments have started to apply design thinking to service delivery (please tweet at me with other examples). But regulation is a different kind of challenge. Regulators have at least two and sometimes three different user groups with very different interests and political supporters — the incumbent regulated industry, the public at large, and, increasingly, industry disrupters. And regulations are supposed to be consistent and durable, not constantly iterated and improved.

But constraints often spur great design, so it’s worth imagining how the Uber question could be approached using design thinking. Rather than asking “Is Uber a taxi and sedan service subject to our existing rules or not?” regulators might ask “What do people expect when they pay someone for a ride, and how do we support and enforce those expectations?” Or, “How do we sustain a competitive local market in rides for hire?” If regulators don’t ask, then elected officials, journalists, or the public could and then demand a response. Public officials from the taxi commission, economic development office, and transportation department could create a graphic of how individual mobility fits into a larger strategy around innovation and growth within their city -- Uber is probably not the last word in disruption in the transportation sector. A working group of drivers and riders could experiment with different regulatory regimes during a trial period and measure compliance costs and consumer benefits or losses. Regulators could promulgate rules that are fairly inexpensive to comply with and easy to adjust, knowing that they might change in two years or six months. A new, collaborative, experiment-driven approach to regulation could send a powerful message to both incumbents and disrupters: like it or not, you need to help design a system for co-existence.

Governments are reasonably good at creating new, exciting programs to spur innovation and entrepreneurship, but pretty terrible at revising the regulations that can stifle new businesses of all sorts, not just new technology-enabled ones. A design-thinking approach could benefit not just businesses that are valued in the billions of dollars, but also smaller scale entrepreneurs and new startups whose business ideas, aspirations, and large and small innovations also matter a lot to the future of cities.

Authors

“More than ever in history, a successful city thrives on the kind of disruption new technology brings,” said New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio last week, but the sentiment has been expressed by many public officials, particularly when they are trying to establish their place’s bona fides as a hub of innovation. But what happens when disruptive technology or business models (Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, General Assembly) meet highly regulated industries (taxi cabs, hotels, education)? How do public officials manage disruption?

Design thinking could help the purposely change-averse parts of the public sector, disruptive businesses (or any businesses, really), and citizens find common ground. Design thinking is a process with many definitions but a few agreed upon steps: define a problem or question; observe potential users to see what they really do and need; use models and pictures to envision solutions; build prototypes and quickly test them to weed out failures before they are locked in and rolled out (healthcare.gov, anyone?); constantly learn and adjust. The approach is messy, collaborative, and, at its best, inspires a spirit of co-creation. In a traditional regulatory approach, by contrast, interactions are tightly structured and one-way, and the resulting regulations are fixed and often cumbersome.

Governments have started to apply design thinking to service delivery (please tweet at me with other examples). But regulation is a different kind of challenge. Regulators have at least two and sometimes three different user groups with very different interests and political supporters — the incumbent regulated industry, the public at large, and, increasingly, industry disrupters. And regulations are supposed to be consistent and durable, not constantly iterated and improved.

But constraints often spur great design, so it’s worth imagining how the Uber question could be approached using design thinking. Rather than asking “Is Uber a taxi and sedan service subject to our existing rules or not?” regulators might ask “What do people expect when they pay someone for a ride, and how do we support and enforce those expectations?” Or, “How do we sustain a competitive local market in rides for hire?” If regulators don’t ask, then elected officials, journalists, or the public could and then demand a response. Public officials from the taxi commission, economic development office, and transportation department could create a graphic of how individual mobility fits into a larger strategy around innovation and growth within their city -- Uber is probably not the last word in disruption in the transportation sector. A working group of drivers and riders could experiment with different regulatory regimes during a trial period and measure compliance costs and consumer benefits or losses. Regulators could promulgate rules that are fairly inexpensive to comply with and easy to adjust, knowing that they might change in two years or six months. A new, collaborative, experiment-driven approach to regulation could send a powerful message to both incumbents and disrupters: like it or not, you need to help design a system for co-existence.

Governments are reasonably good at creating new, exciting programs to spur innovation and entrepreneurship, but pretty terrible at revising the regulations that can stifle new businesses of all sorts, not just new technology-enabled ones. A design-thinking approach could benefit not just businesses that are valued in the billions of dollars, but also smaller scale entrepreneurs and new startups whose business ideas, aspirations, and large and small innovations also matter a lot to the future of cities.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2014/01/07-metropolitan-revolution-lessons-katz-bradley?rssid=bradleyj{A2D8FDF0-546C-4D45-8DF0-31B4C7E6E903}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/65481364/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~Lessons-from-the-Road-The-Metropolitan-RevolutionLessons from the Road: The Metropolitan Revolution 2014

Our thinking about what to expect from cities in 2014 is based on what we saw in the last half of 2013. From June to December, we visited dozens of metropolitan areas in four countries to talk about The Metropolitan Revolution. Based on what we learned on the road, we think that four major developments will unfold in cities and metros over the next year.

1. Cities’ and metros’ capacity for action and innovation won’t be measured solely by the fiscal health of local governments, but rather on the financial commitments and engagement of private, nonprofit, and civic institutions and their leaders.

Detroit provides the best example of this fact: Bankruptcy has not stopped the enormous level of investment in the city (more than $1 billion to date in midtown and downtown). One local journalist tweeted that, after covering the landmark bankruptcy ruling on the morning of December 3, her next stop was covering the opening of a new small business in Midtown. Both stories matter for the future of Detroit.

Cities and metropolitan areas are networks, not merely governments (in the case of metropolitan areas, there’s no overarching government at all). This means that transformative investments can be financed with private, philanthropic, and nonprofit resources, not just public dollars. For example, the M1 rail line in Detroit has been made possible primarily through commitments from nongovernment sources. Similarly, development in downtown and midtown is occurring because of investments made by private companies, universities, health care concerns, and foundations.

The big “aha” moment in a metro comes when nongovernmental leaders recognize that they are co-creators of the metropolitan economy and that, in many ways, they play a large role in governing their communities. Innovation districts—which we described in the book and elsewhere—show how this network effect is playing out. In these districts, fueled mostly by private and civic leadership and finance, the different elements of the metropolitan network bring their resources together to benefit the regional economy and revitalize the urban core.

2. New regional institutions (or old institutions acting in new ways) will become more important. This follows directly from the previous point about cities and metros being networks.

A network works best with focus and stewardship. In Portland, Greater Portland Inc is creating a new model of regional economic development, starting with exports and global engagement, and working alongside groups like the Portland Development Commission. In Chicago, World Business Chicago, chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is driving an ambitious, concrete agenda for economic growth and jobs. These organizations are not doing all the work themselves—rather, they are bringing together a range of metropolitan actors and doing the very hard work of fostering connections and keeping all the players on the same page.

Big economic shocks frequently lead to new or repurposed institutions. The Great Depression created a slew of federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Housing Authority, along with groups like the United States Conference of Mayors. The Great Recession is having a similar effect at the city and metropolitan scale. New institutional arrangements in metros are putting disparate players (public, private, university, civic) around one table, so they can leverage the distinct assets of their communities with evidence, scale, and disciplined focus.

3. Cities and metros are on the front lines of income inequality, and they are using new tools (or old tools in new ways) to tackle it.

For example, San Antonio’s elected leaders asked voters to approve, via ballot referendum, a small sales tax hike to fund all-day prekindergarten classes for eligible four-year-olds. In Philadelphia, a major grocery concern is simultaneously tackling food insecurity and the challenges of re-employment for ex-offenders by opening grocery stores in underserved areas and hiring released offenders to staff them. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland and the Washington, D.C. City Council have agreed to raise their local minimum wages over the next three years to $11.50 (the D.C. mayor is expected to approve the measure in early 2014). New York City’s lauded P-TECH program gives students direct links to employers and combines high school with two years of higher education, so students graduate with an associate degree. Chicago is also connecting students with employers through its ambitious community college reforms, which focus on career preparation.

These innovations show how mayors and other local leaders are using their powers to grapple with major societal challenges. Is it a mayor’s job to deal with income inequality? Well, yes—since education, skills-training, infrastructure, and a host of other jobs-expanding, wage-enhancing, and poverty-reducing measures are actually designed, delivered, and partly financed at the local and metropolitan level.

There’s an analogy to climate change here: No one thought of climate as a local issue until mayors and other local leaders started to lay out serious plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, deploying their extensive powers over land use, zoning, energy, housing, and transport. These solutions also depend on mayors using their informal powers of convening and advocacy as they mobilize new actors to help them deal with challenges. Leaders no longer believe that they are helpless in the face of macroeconomic forces. They may not be able to do everything, but they don’t use that as an excuse to do nothing.

4. Like smart businesses, cities and metros are learning what to copy and what to customize.

Localities have long copied strategies for physical development and place-making—things like downtown revitalization, pedestrian plazas, and freeway demolitions that reconnect cities and waterfronts. That trend continues, with bike sharing and elevated parks (for example, local variations on New York City’s High Line).

At the same time, though, cities and metros are finding game changers that meet their unique needs and opportunities. We like to tell audiences that the best economic development advice comes from country singer Dolly Parton, who said, “Figure out who you are, and do it on purpose.”

Copying makes sense with proven place-making strategies or financing tools that should be routinized, to ensure that each city does not inefficiently “reinvent the wheel.” Customization is absolutely vital when it comes to matching ideas and initiatives to the distinctive competitive advantages and clusters or sectors of different metropolitan economies, and gives people and businesses a reason to invest in one metropolitan area rather than another.

These four developments reinforce and build on each other. Metro leaders understand that cities are networks rather than governments, so they find the right institutions to organize these networks. These networks then address the big challenges that face cities and metros and, at their best, develop the game-changing ideas that will make the most of each place’s unique assets and bring shared benefits of growth.

In 2013, cities and metros stepped up their game in the face of supersized challenges and the absence of national leadership. In 2014, cities and metropolitan areas, and the networks of individuals and institutions that lead them, will do even more to chart a new path forward and lead an affirmative campaign for national renewal. Over the next year we will return to these themes and plan to deepen and sharpen our insights. The Revolution is just getting started.

Authors

Our thinking about what to expect from cities in 2014 is based on what we saw in the last half of 2013. From June to December, we visited dozens of metropolitan areas in four countries to talk about The Metropolitan Revolution. Based on what we learned on the road, we think that four major developments will unfold in cities and metros over the next year.

1. Cities’ and metros’ capacity for action and innovation won’t be measured solely by the fiscal health of local governments, but rather on the financial commitments and engagement of private, nonprofit, and civic institutions and their leaders.

Detroit provides the best example of this fact: Bankruptcy has not stopped the enormous level of investment in the city (more than $1 billion to date in midtown and downtown). One local journalist tweeted that, after covering the landmark bankruptcy ruling on the morning of December 3, her next stop was covering the opening of a new small business in Midtown. Both stories matter for the future of Detroit.

Cities and metropolitan areas are networks, not merely governments (in the case of metropolitan areas, there’s no overarching government at all). This means that transformative investments can be financed with private, philanthropic, and nonprofit resources, not just public dollars. For example, the M1 rail line in Detroit has been made possible primarily through commitments from nongovernment sources. Similarly, development in downtown and midtown is occurring because of investments made by private companies, universities, health care concerns, and foundations.

The big “aha” moment in a metro comes when nongovernmental leaders recognize that they are co-creators of the metropolitan economy and that, in many ways, they play a large role in governing their communities. Innovation districts—which we described in the book and elsewhere—show how this network effect is playing out. In these districts, fueled mostly by private and civic leadership and finance, the different elements of the metropolitan network bring their resources together to benefit the regional economy and revitalize the urban core.

2. New regional institutions (or old institutions acting in new ways) will become more important. This follows directly from the previous point about cities and metros being networks.

A network works best with focus and stewardship. In Portland, Greater Portland Inc is creating a new model of regional economic development, starting with exports and global engagement, and working alongside groups like the Portland Development Commission. In Chicago, World Business Chicago, chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is driving an ambitious, concrete agenda for economic growth and jobs. These organizations are not doing all the work themselves—rather, they are bringing together a range of metropolitan actors and doing the very hard work of fostering connections and keeping all the players on the same page.

Big economic shocks frequently lead to new or repurposed institutions. The Great Depression created a slew of federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Housing Authority, along with groups like the United States Conference of Mayors. The Great Recession is having a similar effect at the city and metropolitan scale. New institutional arrangements in metros are putting disparate players (public, private, university, civic) around one table, so they can leverage the distinct assets of their communities with evidence, scale, and disciplined focus.

3. Cities and metros are on the front lines of income inequality, and they are using new tools (or old tools in new ways) to tackle it.

For example, San Antonio’s elected leaders asked voters to approve, via ballot referendum, a small sales tax hike to fund all-day prekindergarten classes for eligible four-year-olds. In Philadelphia, a major grocery concern is simultaneously tackling food insecurity and the challenges of re-employment for ex-offenders by opening grocery stores in underserved areas and hiring released offenders to staff them. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland and the Washington, D.C. City Council have agreed to raise their local minimum wages over the next three years to $11.50 (the D.C. mayor is expected to approve the measure in early 2014). New York City’s lauded P-TECH program gives students direct links to employers and combines high school with two years of higher education, so students graduate with an associate degree. Chicago is also connecting students with employers through its ambitious community college reforms, which focus on career preparation.

These innovations show how mayors and other local leaders are using their powers to grapple with major societal challenges. Is it a mayor’s job to deal with income inequality? Well, yes—since education, skills-training, infrastructure, and a host of other jobs-expanding, wage-enhancing, and poverty-reducing measures are actually designed, delivered, and partly financed at the local and metropolitan level.

There’s an analogy to climate change here: No one thought of climate as a local issue until mayors and other local leaders started to lay out serious plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, deploying their extensive powers over land use, zoning, energy, housing, and transport. These solutions also depend on mayors using their informal powers of convening and advocacy as they mobilize new actors to help them deal with challenges. Leaders no longer believe that they are helpless in the face of macroeconomic forces. They may not be able to do everything, but they don’t use that as an excuse to do nothing.

4. Like smart businesses, cities and metros are learning what to copy and what to customize.

Localities have long copied strategies for physical development and place-making—things like downtown revitalization, pedestrian plazas, and freeway demolitions that reconnect cities and waterfronts. That trend continues, with bike sharing and elevated parks (for example, local variations on New York City’s High Line).

At the same time, though, cities and metros are finding game changers that meet their unique needs and opportunities. We like to tell audiences that the best economic development advice comes from country singer Dolly Parton, who said, “Figure out who you are, and do it on purpose.”

Copying makes sense with proven place-making strategies or financing tools that should be routinized, to ensure that each city does not inefficiently “reinvent the wheel.” Customization is absolutely vital when it comes to matching ideas and initiatives to the distinctive competitive advantages and clusters or sectors of different metropolitan economies, and gives people and businesses a reason to invest in one metropolitan area rather than another.

These four developments reinforce and build on each other. Metro leaders understand that cities are networks rather than governments, so they find the right institutions to organize these networks. These networks then address the big challenges that face cities and metros and, at their best, develop the game-changing ideas that will make the most of each place’s unique assets and bring shared benefits of growth.

In 2013, cities and metros stepped up their game in the face of supersized challenges and the absence of national leadership. In 2014, cities and metropolitan areas, and the networks of individuals and institutions that lead them, will do even more to chart a new path forward and lead an affirmative campaign for national renewal. Over the next year we will return to these themes and plan to deepen and sharpen our insights. The Revolution is just getting started.

Since our own book, The Metropolitan Revolution, was published in June, we've encountered many other great books and amazing authors, who have inspired us, challenged us, and generally made us think. As 2013 comes to a close, here are 13 books (and a bonus e-book) you should investigate if you want to know more about why cities and metros matter, about the magnitude of the challenges that they are taking on, and about how they can do better.

1. William Antholis, Inside Out, India and China: Local Politics Goes Global. Antholis describes how India and China are becoming metropolitan nations, with an abundance of policy and economic innovation happening at the local level. His guide to the metropolitan intricacies and diversities of these fast growing countries (and emerging markets) comes at exactly the right time for U.S. metro leaders looking to connect across borders.

2. Ben Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World. Not only does Barber have the best title of the year, he has the most sweeping scope. He deftly shows how mayors across the globe are not only solving practical problems, they are also grappling with some of the biggest, most enduring questions in political philosophy.

3. Vishaan Chakrabarti, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for Urban America. Chakrabarti's beautifully designed manifesto is totally winning, with excellent infographics, and lively pop culture references. This the kind of book that reconnects urbanists with the passion that brought them into this field in the first place -- and helps others understand why urbanists care so much about what they do.

4. Danny Dorling, Population 10 Billion. Dorling lays out not only different population scenarios, he also shows readers how to interpret these scenarios, and other stories people tell about the future of the planet. This sentence, "Being afraid only gets you so far; being determined moves you further on; being better informed can give you hope," should be the policy wonk credo.

5. Thomas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream. "Understanding America requires understanding Chicago," Dyja declares, and then proceeds to argue his case. While William Cronin's magnificent book Nature's Metropolis showed readers how Chicago was the iconic American city of the 19th century, Dyja explains how Chicago was the incubator for American culture in the 20th century.

6. Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs. For decades, the traditional suburb seemed inevitable the perfect example of market satisfaction of desires. Gallagher's smart and lively book explains that the suburbs were a product of policy, not just preference (updating Kenneth Jackson's arguments in Crabgrass Frontier). She argues that, like cities before them, suburbs are shifting and changing to keep up with how people really live.

7. Victor Hwang & Greg Horowitt, The Rainforest. The secret to building the next Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurship and innovation depend on networks and relationships based on trust and reciprocity. Based on their own venture capital experience, Hwang and Horowitt explain why having the right raw ingredients for a flourishing company, community, or project is not enough -- you need the right ecosystem.

9. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State. You should thank government, in addition to Steve Jobs, for your beloved iPhone. This impassioned book highlights that, although we might think of government as bureaucratic, hidebound, and backwards, it is actual a major engine of innovation, risk taking and creativity.

10. George Packer, The Unwinding. Packer's epic traces the changes to our country over the past several decades and documents ills of the U.S. economy post-Great Recession. It is a sobering, compelling glimpse into the causes of our national housing crisis, stagnant economy, and rising inequality, while still retaining an appreciation for the optimism and entrepreneurship of its subjects.

11. Cass Sunstein, Simpler: The Future of Government. This book is an oxymoron: an adventure story about government regulation. Sunstein uses his experience as head of an obscure but very important federal office to show how attention to behavioral economics can vastly improve the way government sets rules, defines choices, and improves people's wellbeing. His test bed is the federal government, but these lessons apply equally well to states and municipalities.

12. Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. Too many analyses of American education tell readers what to do. Amanda Ripley shows us what other countries do, and indicates that it's quite possible for American schools, from poor and rich neighborhoods to do better. One of her best observations: we should celebrate the challenge of math as much as we applaud the challenges of competitive sports.

13. Witold Rybczynski, How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit. Rybczynski's book gracefully bridges the gap between those who see the city-as-people and those who see the city-as-buildings, by explaining why buildings matter to people, and how they shape our experience. Great architecture, in his telling, is the three dimensional expression of great ideas.

14. (Bonus e-book) Aaron M. Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City. We don't always agree with Aaron Renn, better known as The Urbanophile, but we learn a lot from his smart and well-researched observations. He's a tireless advocate of getting the basics right, and making sure that cities don't become precious playgrounds for the one percent. Read this book, and everything else he writes.

Authors

Since our own book, The Metropolitan Revolution, was published in June, we've encountered many other great books and amazing authors, who have inspired us, challenged us, and generally made us think. As 2013 comes to a close, here are 13 books (and a bonus e-book) you should investigate if you want to know more about why cities and metros matter, about the magnitude of the challenges that they are taking on, and about how they can do better.

1. William Antholis, Inside Out, India and China: Local Politics Goes Global. Antholis describes how India and China are becoming metropolitan nations, with an abundance of policy and economic innovation happening at the local level. His guide to the metropolitan intricacies and diversities of these fast growing countries (and emerging markets) comes at exactly the right time for U.S. metro leaders looking to connect across borders.

2. Ben Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World. Not only does Barber have the best title of the year, he has the most sweeping scope. He deftly shows how mayors across the globe are not only solving practical problems, they are also grappling with some of the biggest, most enduring questions in political philosophy.

3. Vishaan Chakrabarti, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for Urban America. Chakrabarti's beautifully designed manifesto is totally winning, with excellent infographics, and lively pop culture references. This the kind of book that reconnects urbanists with the passion that brought them into this field in the first place -- and helps others understand why urbanists care so much about what they do.

4. Danny Dorling, Population 10 Billion. Dorling lays out not only different population scenarios, he also shows readers how to interpret these scenarios, and other stories people tell about the future of the planet. This sentence, "Being afraid only gets you so far; being determined moves you further on; being better informed can give you hope," should be the policy wonk credo.

5. Thomas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream. "Understanding America requires understanding Chicago," Dyja declares, and then proceeds to argue his case. While William Cronin's magnificent book Nature's Metropolis showed readers how Chicago was the iconic American city of the 19th century, Dyja explains how Chicago was the incubator for American culture in the 20th century.

6. Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs. For decades, the traditional suburb seemed inevitable the perfect example of market satisfaction of desires. Gallagher's smart and lively book explains that the suburbs were a product of policy, not just preference (updating Kenneth Jackson's arguments in Crabgrass Frontier). She argues that, like cities before them, suburbs are shifting and changing to keep up with how people really live.

7. Victor Hwang & Greg Horowitt, The Rainforest. The secret to building the next Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurship and innovation depend on networks and relationships based on trust and reciprocity. Based on their own venture capital experience, Hwang and Horowitt explain why having the right raw ingredients for a flourishing company, community, or project is not enough -- you need the right ecosystem.

9. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State. You should thank government, in addition to Steve Jobs, for your beloved iPhone. This impassioned book highlights that, although we might think of government as bureaucratic, hidebound, and backwards, it is actual a major engine of innovation, risk taking and creativity.

10. George Packer, The Unwinding. Packer's epic traces the changes to our country over the past several decades and documents ills of the U.S. economy post-Great Recession. It is a sobering, compelling glimpse into the causes of our national housing crisis, stagnant economy, and rising inequality, while still retaining an appreciation for the optimism and entrepreneurship of its subjects.

11. Cass Sunstein, Simpler: The Future of Government. This book is an oxymoron: an adventure story about government regulation. Sunstein uses his experience as head of an obscure but very important federal office to show how attention to behavioral economics can vastly improve the way government sets rules, defines choices, and improves people's wellbeing. His test bed is the federal government, but these lessons apply equally well to states and municipalities.

12. Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. Too many analyses of American education tell readers what to do. Amanda Ripley shows us what other countries do, and indicates that it's quite possible for American schools, from poor and rich neighborhoods to do better. One of her best observations: we should celebrate the challenge of math as much as we applaud the challenges of competitive sports.

13. Witold Rybczynski, How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit. Rybczynski's book gracefully bridges the gap between those who see the city-as-people and those who see the city-as-buildings, by explaining why buildings matter to people, and how they shape our experience. Great architecture, in his telling, is the three dimensional expression of great ideas.

14. (Bonus e-book) Aaron M. Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City. We don't always agree with Aaron Renn, better known as The Urbanophile, but we learn a lot from his smart and well-researched observations. He's a tireless advocate of getting the basics right, and making sure that cities don't become precious playgrounds for the one percent. Read this book, and everything else he writes.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2013/11/22-new-york-tech-economy-bradley-washburn?rssid=bradleyj{29A46794-4E80-4C77-97DF-442C99088E00}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/65481366/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~How-New-York-is-Building-its-Tech-Economy-One-Industry-at-a-TimeHow New York is Building its Tech Economy, One Industry at a Time

Our colleague Walter Valdivia released a new study yesterday that examines how universities can best benefit from the inventions generated within their labs and classrooms. One of the key findings is that universities must focus on creating spin-offs and supporting entrepreneurship, rather than betting heavily on lucrative patent licensing deals.

The campus, which will be housed in an expanded Steiner Studios lot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard will offer degree programs in urban design, responsive environments, product design and manufacturing, social media, and gaming, among others.

New York's expansion of its Applied Sciences endeavor should remind observers that innovation, and the creation of new nationally and globally-competitive goods and services, is the critical driver of economic growth across all industries. This is not just about technology-focused companies, but moving every sector, and the products they produce and services they provide, up the value chain.

The careful way the city has chosen institutions and degree programs that match existing industry strengths or latent capacity is also important. New York is trying to marry new technologies to economic sectors that it's already strong in, such as media, medicine, and urban systems and design. These Applied Sciences institutions thus will be part of a rich network of firms and supporting institutions. Rather than striving to become the “next Silicon Valley,” cities should aim to transform into the next best version of themselves.

In New York’s case, the Integrative Media Program builds on the city’s expertise in television, film, and other media production and the city’s position as the East Coast hub of the entertainment industry, anchored by the largest film production studio outside Hollywood.

Authors

Our colleague Walter Valdivia released a new study yesterday that examines how universities can best benefit from the inventions generated within their labs and classrooms. One of the key findings is that universities must focus on creating spin-offs and supporting entrepreneurship, rather than betting heavily on lucrative patent licensing deals.

The campus, which will be housed in an expanded Steiner Studios lot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard will offer degree programs in urban design, responsive environments, product design and manufacturing, social media, and gaming, among others.

New York's expansion of its Applied Sciences endeavor should remind observers that innovation, and the creation of new nationally and globally-competitive goods and services, is the critical driver of economic growth across all industries. This is not just about technology-focused companies, but moving every sector, and the products they produce and services they provide, up the value chain.

The careful way the city has chosen institutions and degree programs that match existing industry strengths or latent capacity is also important. New York is trying to marry new technologies to economic sectors that it's already strong in, such as media, medicine, and urban systems and design. These Applied Sciences institutions thus will be part of a rich network of firms and supporting institutions. Rather than striving to become the “next Silicon Valley,” cities should aim to transform into the next best version of themselves.

In New York’s case, the Integrative Media Program builds on the city’s expertise in television, film, and other media production and the city’s position as the East Coast hub of the entertainment industry, anchored by the largest film production studio outside Hollywood.

On Election Day, voters in 22 of America’s 100 largest cities decided who will lead their city by either electing new mayors or extending the tenure of incumbents. As cities and metropolitan areas fill the policy vacuum left by a dysfunctional Washington, the mayor’s job is bigger than ever. Here are three things that should be at the top of a mayoral agenda

Engage the Greater Metropolitan Area

First, a mayor has to engage the greater metropolitan area, and help other elected officials in the region set a bold agenda on economic development. Cities and suburbs can’t go it alone in the global economy. They have to, as former mayor of Denver John Hickenlooper says, “Collaborate to compete.” Projects ripe for collaboration include major infrastructure and transit projects or a regional economic development plan that draws on the unique strengths of their region.

Connect with Peers Across the Country

Second, big city mayors in particular need to connect with their peers across the country to make progress on the issues that matter most to them. This is not easy—Mayor Bloomberg played an essential role rallying mayors on gun control and immigration, only to see the federal government dither and delay. But success is possible. Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa created a national coalition on transit funding reform and changed federal law. Mayors need to show Washington that bipartisan problem solving is possible.

Go Global

Finally, America’s mayors need to go global. Exports have grown about 12 percent per year since the recession, while overall growth has been about 2.2 percent. Finding new markets abroad is as important as filling potholes at home. Portland, Oregon’s business, civic, and elected leadership has an actionable plan to double exports in the next five years, which will add more than 100,000 jobs to the region’s economy.

American cities face significant challenges. There is a yawning jobs deficit and sharp growth in poverty and near poverty. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor and near poor in the United States increased from 81 million to 107 million.

Mayors deal every day with the consequences of too little opportunity and widening income gaps. It is up to them to crack the code on affordable housing and on raising the science, technology, engineering, and math skills of their residents. Today's mayors can no longer be content to be good managers of city services—as important as that task is. They also have to engage networks—within the city, across the country, and around the world.

Authors

On Election Day, voters in 22 of America’s 100 largest cities decided who will lead their city by either electing new mayors or extending the tenure of incumbents. As cities and metropolitan areas fill the policy vacuum left by a dysfunctional Washington, the mayor’s job is bigger than ever. Here are three things that should be at the top of a mayoral agenda

Engage the Greater Metropolitan Area

First, a mayor has to engage the greater metropolitan area, and help other elected officials in the region set a bold agenda on economic development. Cities and suburbs can’t go it alone in the global economy. They have to, as former mayor of Denver John Hickenlooper says, “Collaborate to compete.” Projects ripe for collaboration include major infrastructure and transit projects or a regional economic development plan that draws on the unique strengths of their region.

Connect with Peers Across the Country

Second, big city mayors in particular need to connect with their peers across the country to make progress on the issues that matter most to them. This is not easy—Mayor Bloomberg played an essential role rallying mayors on gun control and immigration, only to see the federal government dither and delay. But success is possible. Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa created a national coalition on transit funding reform and changed federal law. Mayors need to show Washington that bipartisan problem solving is possible.

Go Global

Finally, America’s mayors need to go global. Exports have grown about 12 percent per year since the recession, while overall growth has been about 2.2 percent. Finding new markets abroad is as important as filling potholes at home. Portland, Oregon’s business, civic, and elected leadership has an actionable plan to double exports in the next five years, which will add more than 100,000 jobs to the region’s economy.

American cities face significant challenges. There is a yawning jobs deficit and sharp growth in poverty and near poverty. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor and near poor in the United States increased from 81 million to 107 million.

Mayors deal every day with the consequences of too little opportunity and widening income gaps. It is up to them to crack the code on affordable housing and on raising the science, technology, engineering, and math skills of their residents. Today's mayors can no longer be content to be good managers of city services—as important as that task is. They also have to engage networks—within the city, across the country, and around the world.

A revolution is stirring in America. Leaders in cities and metropolitan areas are doing the hard work of reshaping their economies and thereby the economy of the US as a whole. The work is not being done by elected officials alone, but in concert with heads of companies, universities, medical campuses, metropolitan business associations, labour unions, civic organisations, environmental groups, cultural institutions and philanthropies, working in overlapping and interlocking networks. Lacking any choice, these networks are supporting advanced manufacturing, export promotion and foreign direct investment; creating new public-private financing mechanisms for advanced transport and energy infrastructure; upgrading the education and skills of a diversifying workforce; and forging strong relationships with trading partners in mature and rising economies alike.

The basis of this revolution is that cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of economic prosperity and social transformation in the US. The country’s 388 metropolitan areas are home to 84% of its population and generate 91% of national GDP. Metros dominate because they concentrate the innovative firms, talented workers, risk-taking entrepreneurs, and supportive institutions and associations that coproduce economic performance and progress. There is, in essence, no American economy. Rather, the national economy is a network of metropolitan economies.

In the wake of the Great Recession, it has become clear that the US, like many nations, needs to reorient economic growth away from consumption and debt and towards production, exports, innovation and opportunities for all. It has also become clear that, after a brief and much-needed burst of federal stimulus spending, America’s cities and metropolitan areas have been left largely on their own to develop and deliver this model because the US government is mired in partisan division and rancour.

The factors that drive the metropolitan revolution in the US are not confined to North America. The world’s 300 largest metro economies now contain approximately 19% of the global population, but account for 48% of world GDP, according to the 2012 Brookings Global Metro Monitor report. The top 50 metropolitan areas in the EU harbour 36% of its 502 million people, but generate 43% of its $16tn of GDP.

Germany’s top four metropolitan economies – Cologne-Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart – contain just over a quarter of the country’s population but generate more than 30% of national GDP. Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Seville represent 35% of Spain’s population, but nearly 40% of its GDP. The top 10 metro economies in the UK house just over the half its population, but produce nearly two-thirds of the country’s output, with more than one-third coming from Greater London alone.

While capital regions tend to dominate in terms of both population and economic output in European nations, so-called second-tier cities and regions also make major, even disproportionate, contributions to national economies. Evidence suggests that European countries, such as Germany, that rely more on a greater number of metropolitan engines, rather than focusing investments almost exclusively on their capitals, saw more robust growth before the Great Recession and somewhat less of an employment jolt during and immediately after it. Of course, national-level policies in Germany, such as a commitment to manufacturing and exports, are critically important to the relatively robust performance of that nation and its metros. That said, according to a recent report by Professor Michael Parkinson at Liverpool John Moores University, “Germany’s economic resilience has been helped by key state and city actors putting in place the necessary infrastructure and investment so that key urban economies flourish”.

As in the US, national governments in Europe are not necessarily supportive of their metropolitan engines. Many national governments are pursuing post-recession austerity policies that sharply limit their ability to invest in metropolitan areas and increase – or even maintain – spending in areas like infrastructure, education, innovation and transport, which are vitally important to metropolitan economies.

But cities and metropolitan regions in the US and Europe do not have the same tools to use in grappling with those challenges. US cities and their mayors enjoy wide-ranging formal and informal powers, with control over locally raised revenue among the most important. On average, 60% of local revenues are raised through property taxes, income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes, tourist taxes and user fees. Given these fiscal tools, cities are able to access the municipal bond markets and use innovative financing techniques, such as tax increment financing, to support specific economic development strategies and projects. Cities and counties in many states can seek voter support for bonds or dedicated new taxes to support specific projects. All these financing tools can raise additional funding and resources from outside of government.

There is an inextricable link between fiscal devolution and the shaping of economies in cities and metropolitan areas. In New York City, for instance, mayor Michael Bloomberg has sought to diversify the city’s economy from an over-reliance on financial services. The mayor’s office and the New York City Economic Development Corporation created the Applied Sciences NYC initiative, which will support three graduate-level science and engineering schools in the city. The city redirected about $130m from its infrastructure budget to support physical improvements at the campuses. In return, it will see $2bn in investment as the campuses are built and, over the next three decades, it could realise 48,000 new jobs, 1,000 new companies, and $33bn in economic impact.

The power of city leaders in the US to ask voters for additional funds is also critical. In 2004, for example, voters in Denver, Colorado approved a 0.4% sales tax increase for a $4.7bn (now $6.8bn) plan to expand the regional transport system. This major regional investment is the catalyst for significant development and private investment along the new transit corridors. Similarly, in 2008, voters in Los Angeles approved a half-cent sales tax increase to build a major transport system in the county. Over the next 10 years, thanks to a federal loan to jumpstart construction, the project will create 160,000 new jobs in construction, operations and maintenance in the metro area, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestion.

There are, of course, drawbacks, to the US system of fiscal devolution. It enhances the vulnerability of cities during recessions, as tax revenues plummet while demand for public services soars. Rather than coming to the aid of cities, federal and state governments have made cuts to key programs for cities in order to address their own major budget issues. Cities and metropolitan areas in the US bear more responsibility for their own destiny than cities and metros in many other nations, for better or worse.

The metropolitan revolution in Europe

We see signs of the metropolitan revolution in many European cities and regions. Whether their central governments are free spending or frugal, permissive with devolution or stingy, these cities and regions are using their existing powers creatively. This is the true spirit of the metropolitan revolution. Places are not waiting for the perfect conditions, but rather are being impelled by radically imperfect conditions and grappling with them as best they can.

Eindhoven is the fifth-largest city region in the Netherlands, but it is a European leader in innovation.[i] With only 4% of the Netherlands’ total population, it accounts for 37% of the nation’s patents and 24% of its private R&D. Historically, this innovation power is largely attributable to the presence of Philips electronics, which started as lightbulb factory in Eindhoven in 1891. Yet from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, Eindhoven suffered from major employment losses as Philips shifted production work to low-cost countries. The business cut thousands of jobs and additional job losses came from the DAF truck company. Leaders in Eindhoven and 20 surrounding municipalities responded with an aptly named Stimulus program to create jobs and bolster industry, using some EU funds, but supplementing them with their own resources at a rate of 11.5 guilders per resident per year.

By the early 2000s, it was clear that Eindhoven needed an even more robust strategy to counter the structural changes in manufacturing that lead to the off-shoring of routine manufacturing jobs. Regional actors, including representatives from business, the education sector and regional government, created the Horizon programme, a publicly funded regional strategy to emphasise the innovation strengths of the region. The Horizon programme had a small staff, a steering committee and well-defined objectives. Its successes include the development of a marketing plan for the opening and redesign of the High Tech Campus Eindhoven around the concept of open innovation. Originally, this property was an exclusive Philips research campus, but the most inventive companies in the most inventive sectors increasingly depend on collaborative and open innovation. Philips companies, including ASML, NXP and FEI, have grown steadily at the High Tech Campus. Other successful Horizon projects included Brainport International Community, which aimed at attracting international high-tech talent to the region.

The Netherlands’ government structure facilitated Eindhoven’s actions. Directly elected bodies create the budgets of provinces and municipalities. These expenditures are funded by the central government and supplemented when necessary by fees and additional taxes that provinces and municipalities have the discretion to apply. Both types of funds – those from the central government and those raised independently – can be spent as the province or municipality sees fit, so these levels of government have a fair amount of autonomy to pursue policy objectives. Thus, Eindhoven’s elected leaders had the leeway to fund Horizon and to contribute to Brainport.

Barcelona is another example of metropolitan innovation. In Spain, decentralisation of power to autonomous communities in 2006 passed responsibilities in health and education to the regional level. Regions also play a significant role in attracting foreign direct investment and funding advanced research and development. Some critics blame Spain’s current woes partly on decentralisation, profligate spending and large deficits in regions like Catalonia. Now, severe austerity measures will likely result in more centralisation, due to large cuts in local and regional budgets.

Yet empowering Spanish metros to set policy in certain areas has led to transformative economy shaping. One of the most promising efforts is the Barcelona innovation district, known as 22@ Barcelona. In less than a decade, 4,500 firms have moved to the area, thousands of housing units have been built, and linkages to more than 10 universities, 12 R&D technology clusters, and new spaces for start-ups have been created in a highly integrated system of innovation-driven development.

Through extensive public investment and strong, focused public planning, Barcelona has transformed a 494-acre industrial area. There were significant infusions of EU, national, and provincial level funds (more than €180million) that covered the costs of burying train tracks, building a public tram and setting up new energy and telecommunications services. But innovative market mechanisms, such as density bonuses and exactions for infrastructure, were used to generate private revenue.

The transformation of the physical space was paired with efforts to create a new knowledge and innovation hub. After studying the city’s economic and geographic advantages, leaders of 22@Barcelona decide to pursue five industry clusters: media, medical technologies, information and communications technology, energy, and design. City leaders then did intensive work to lure universities, institutions, companies and organisations to the district, and also created meeting and residential spaces for specific industries, a technology centre, incubators, and residences for students and workers.

We could highlight other efforts elsewhere: Copenhagen’s push to be at the vanguard of sustainable development has yielded many economic and fiscal benefits. Turin’s transformation from an auto-dependent economy to a diversified one serves as the model for Detroit. Munich’s powerful network of world-class firms, advanced research institutions and high-tech centres make it a world leader in innovation.

Options for English cities and regions

England is far more centralised than Spain, Germany or the Netherlands. While there has been considerable devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the UK government has kept hold of the economy-shaping agenda, devolving very little to English local governments. Post-recession, the governing coalition embraced devolution, rhetorically at least, as means for delivering government more efficiently. Part of this stems from the success of giving London more control over regional economic policymaking in 2000, which has led to the Localism Act and the creation of local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) between business, political and civic leaders.

But while the central government is travelling in the right direction on devolution, it is moving at a very deliberate pace. Lord Heseltine’s report on economic growth and devolution called for “a very significant devolution of funding from central government to local enterprise partnerships so that government investment in economic development is tailored directly to the individual challenges and opportunities of our communities, and can be augmented by private sector investment”.Lord Heseltine called for £49bn over four years; the government has instead allocated £2bn a year over the next five years into a Single Local Growth Fund. Much of the money in the local growth fund had already been allocated to cities and regions and it is not at all clear how much of their share a city or region will be able to spend flexibly (ie, how much is really ‘un-ringfenced’). At the same time, the central government plans to cut local authority budgets by 10%.

Given this tepid commitment to devolution, the challenge for England’s cities and regions is to use the resources that they do have in a way that convinces central government that devolution is a good bet for economic growth. That means creating economic growth plans that not only wisely use the existing funds, but make a bold case for what LEPs and local governments intend to do. Alexandra Jones of Centre for Cities describes this as “looking beyond the single pot” and “setting the agenda for the future”.

The City Deals programme, which started in 2011, indicates what networks of metropolitan leaders might do with more flexibility. As with the proposed single pot, City Deals gives cities greater control of central government funds for transportation, housing and apprenticeships. Greater Manchester’s City Deal will establish a low-carbon hub and a regional strategy to achieve a 48% reduction in carbon emissions in the urban area by 2020. The central government in London agreed to support the region’s applications for funding from the EU and to commit national funds from the UK Green Investment Bank to a joint green-venture fund. The fund will have the authority and flexibility to develop an investment portfolio in areas from retrofits to public buildings and houses. In October 2012, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change signed a memorandum of understanding that outlined goals and division of responsibilities between the metro and the central government for implementing the low carbon hub and realising the region’s carbon reduction goal.

The Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP (GBSLEP) has created a careful outline for how it intends to organise itself differently and the projects it will prioritise to take advantage of the Single Local Growth Fund opportunities. These projects include infrastructure investments, projects that strengthen the innovation potential of sectors such as advanced industries and life sciences, and skills training that connects with employer needs. The GBSLEP plan, created in consultation with Lord Heseltine, clearly demonstrates that networks of local leaders approach problems in a significantly more integrated fashion than national leaders. For example, the central government has declared that it will not devolve innovation funding, focusing instead on transport, housing, and skills. But Greater Birmingham and Solihull business and elected leaders understand that innovation is a priority for their economy and hope to use single pot funds as they can to support innovation. They support, for example, land development around the city’s Advanced Manufacturing Hub and the clean-up of contaminated sites adjacent to a major hospital and Birmingham University.

English cities and regions are without a doubt at a disadvantage compared to cities and regions elsewhere when it comes to implementing the metropolitan revolution. But, given the larger trends in the economy and the importance of designing city and regional answers to city and regional challenges, they have no choice but to push on and convince the central government to devolve more. The competitiveness of English regions, and the larger UK economy, depends on it.

Putting cities at the forefront

It is a disruptive act for cities and metropolitan areas to assert themselves as the engines of national growth and prosperity. Nations, states, and provinces are the largest single investors in cities and metropolitan areas, their infrastructure, their residents (particularly disadvantaged ones) and their leading-edge institutions. They set the regulatory rules of the game by which cities and metros (and their companies and core institutions) grow advanced industries, attract global talent and compete on the world stage. It is impossible to ignore these higher levels of government, even as local leaders condemn their inaction and unreliability or decry their prescriptive and intrusive tendencies.

The point of the metropolitan revolution is not that these so-called higher levels of government do not matter. Rather, the point is that they must act in service of their metropolitan engines. Every metropolitan leader – and every national leader – must ask how national governments, local governments and other actors should interact to coproduce the economy. Waves of economic change have put cities and metros at the forefront. Will national governments ignore these changes, or will they recognise that supporting metropolitan areas is the new imperative?

[i] The Eindhoven story is based largely on the excellent account given in Leo Van Den Berg, Jan Van Der Meer, Alexander H.J. Otgaar, and Carolien J.M. Speller in “Brainport: Eindhoven” in Empowering metropolitan regions through new forms of cooperation: New perspectives on metropolitan governance (European Institute for Comparative Urban Research, 2006) and on Ana Maria Fernandez-Maldonado “Combining design and high-tech in knowledge cities: the case of Eindhoven,” Presented at for the Knowledge Cities World Summit 2010 Conference, Melbourne, 16-19 November 2010.

Authors

A revolution is stirring in America. Leaders in cities and metropolitan areas are doing the hard work of reshaping their economies and thereby the economy of the US as a whole. The work is not being done by elected officials alone, but in concert with heads of companies, universities, medical campuses, metropolitan business associations, labour unions, civic organisations, environmental groups, cultural institutions and philanthropies, working in overlapping and interlocking networks. Lacking any choice, these networks are supporting advanced manufacturing, export promotion and foreign direct investment; creating new public-private financing mechanisms for advanced transport and energy infrastructure; upgrading the education and skills of a diversifying workforce; and forging strong relationships with trading partners in mature and rising economies alike.

The basis of this revolution is that cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of economic prosperity and social transformation in the US. The country’s 388 metropolitan areas are home to 84% of its population and generate 91% of national GDP. Metros dominate because they concentrate the innovative firms, talented workers, risk-taking entrepreneurs, and supportive institutions and associations that coproduce economic performance and progress. There is, in essence, no American economy. Rather, the national economy is a network of metropolitan economies.

In the wake of the Great Recession, it has become clear that the US, like many nations, needs to reorient economic growth away from consumption and debt and towards production, exports, innovation and opportunities for all. It has also become clear that, after a brief and much-needed burst of federal stimulus spending, America’s cities and metropolitan areas have been left largely on their own to develop and deliver this model because the US government is mired in partisan division and rancour.

The factors that drive the metropolitan revolution in the US are not confined to North America. The world’s 300 largest metro economies now contain approximately 19% of the global population, but account for 48% of world GDP, according to the 2012 Brookings Global Metro Monitor report. The top 50 metropolitan areas in the EU harbour 36% of its 502 million people, but generate 43% of its $16tn of GDP.

Germany’s top four metropolitan economies – Cologne-Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart – contain just over a quarter of the country’s population but generate more than 30% of national GDP. Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Seville represent 35% of Spain’s population, but nearly 40% of its GDP. The top 10 metro economies in the UK house just over the half its population, but produce nearly two-thirds of the country’s output, with more than one-third coming from Greater London alone.

While capital regions tend to dominate in terms of both population and economic output in European nations, so-called second-tier cities and regions also make major, even disproportionate, contributions to national economies. Evidence suggests that European countries, such as Germany, that rely more on a greater number of metropolitan engines, rather than focusing investments almost exclusively on their capitals, saw more robust growth before the Great Recession and somewhat less of an employment jolt during and immediately after it. Of course, national-level policies in Germany, such as a commitment to manufacturing and exports, are critically important to the relatively robust performance of that nation and its metros. That said, according to a recent report by Professor Michael Parkinson at Liverpool John Moores University, “Germany’s economic resilience has been helped by key state and city actors putting in place the necessary infrastructure and investment so that key urban economies flourish”.

As in the US, national governments in Europe are not necessarily supportive of their metropolitan engines. Many national governments are pursuing post-recession austerity policies that sharply limit their ability to invest in metropolitan areas and increase – or even maintain – spending in areas like infrastructure, education, innovation and transport, which are vitally important to metropolitan economies.

But cities and metropolitan regions in the US and Europe do not have the same tools to use in grappling with those challenges. US cities and their mayors enjoy wide-ranging formal and informal powers, with control over locally raised revenue among the most important. On average, 60% of local revenues are raised through property taxes, income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes, tourist taxes and user fees. Given these fiscal tools, cities are able to access the municipal bond markets and use innovative financing techniques, such as tax increment financing, to support specific economic development strategies and projects. Cities and counties in many states can seek voter support for bonds or dedicated new taxes to support specific projects. All these financing tools can raise additional funding and resources from outside of government.

There is an inextricable link between fiscal devolution and the shaping of economies in cities and metropolitan areas. In New York City, for instance, mayor Michael Bloomberg has sought to diversify the city’s economy from an over-reliance on financial services. The mayor’s office and the New York City Economic Development Corporation created the Applied Sciences NYC initiative, which will support three graduate-level science and engineering schools in the city. The city redirected about $130m from its infrastructure budget to support physical improvements at the campuses. In return, it will see $2bn in investment as the campuses are built and, over the next three decades, it could realise 48,000 new jobs, 1,000 new companies, and $33bn in economic impact.

The power of city leaders in the US to ask voters for additional funds is also critical. In 2004, for example, voters in Denver, Colorado approved a 0.4% sales tax increase for a $4.7bn (now $6.8bn) plan to expand the regional transport system. This major regional investment is the catalyst for significant development and private investment along the new transit corridors. Similarly, in 2008, voters in Los Angeles approved a half-cent sales tax increase to build a major transport system in the county. Over the next 10 years, thanks to a federal loan to jumpstart construction, the project will create 160,000 new jobs in construction, operations and maintenance in the metro area, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestion.

There are, of course, drawbacks, to the US system of fiscal devolution. It enhances the vulnerability of cities during recessions, as tax revenues plummet while demand for public services soars. Rather than coming to the aid of cities, federal and state governments have made cuts to key programs for cities in order to address their own major budget issues. Cities and metropolitan areas in the US bear more responsibility for their own destiny than cities and metros in many other nations, for better or worse.

The metropolitan revolution in Europe

We see signs of the metropolitan revolution in many European cities and regions. Whether their central governments are free spending or frugal, permissive with devolution or stingy, these cities and regions are using their existing powers creatively. This is the true spirit of the metropolitan revolution. Places are not waiting for the perfect conditions, but rather are being impelled by radically imperfect conditions and grappling with them as best they can.

Eindhoven is the fifth-largest city region in the Netherlands, but it is a European leader in innovation.[i] With only 4% of the Netherlands’ total population, it accounts for 37% of the nation’s patents and 24% of its private R&D. Historically, this innovation power is largely attributable to the presence of Philips electronics, which started as lightbulb factory in Eindhoven in 1891. Yet from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, Eindhoven suffered from major employment losses as Philips shifted production work to low-cost countries. The business cut thousands of jobs and additional job losses came from the DAF truck company. Leaders in Eindhoven and 20 surrounding municipalities responded with an aptly named Stimulus program to create jobs and bolster industry, using some EU funds, but supplementing them with their own resources at a rate of 11.5 guilders per resident per year.

By the early 2000s, it was clear that Eindhoven needed an even more robust strategy to counter the structural changes in manufacturing that lead to the off-shoring of routine manufacturing jobs. Regional actors, including representatives from business, the education sector and regional government, created the Horizon programme, a publicly funded regional strategy to emphasise the innovation strengths of the region. The Horizon programme had a small staff, a steering committee and well-defined objectives. Its successes include the development of a marketing plan for the opening and redesign of the High Tech Campus Eindhoven around the concept of open innovation. Originally, this property was an exclusive Philips research campus, but the most inventive companies in the most inventive sectors increasingly depend on collaborative and open innovation. Philips companies, including ASML, NXP and FEI, have grown steadily at the High Tech Campus. Other successful Horizon projects included Brainport International Community, which aimed at attracting international high-tech talent to the region.

The Netherlands’ government structure facilitated Eindhoven’s actions. Directly elected bodies create the budgets of provinces and municipalities. These expenditures are funded by the central government and supplemented when necessary by fees and additional taxes that provinces and municipalities have the discretion to apply. Both types of funds – those from the central government and those raised independently – can be spent as the province or municipality sees fit, so these levels of government have a fair amount of autonomy to pursue policy objectives. Thus, Eindhoven’s elected leaders had the leeway to fund Horizon and to contribute to Brainport.

Barcelona is another example of metropolitan innovation. In Spain, decentralisation of power to autonomous communities in 2006 passed responsibilities in health and education to the regional level. Regions also play a significant role in attracting foreign direct investment and funding advanced research and development. Some critics blame Spain’s current woes partly on decentralisation, profligate spending and large deficits in regions like Catalonia. Now, severe austerity measures will likely result in more centralisation, due to large cuts in local and regional budgets.

Yet empowering Spanish metros to set policy in certain areas has led to transformative economy shaping. One of the most promising efforts is the Barcelona innovation district, known as 22@ Barcelona. In less than a decade, 4,500 firms have moved to the area, thousands of housing units have been built, and linkages to more than 10 universities, 12 R&D technology clusters, and new spaces for start-ups have been created in a highly integrated system of innovation-driven development.

Through extensive public investment and strong, focused public planning, Barcelona has transformed a 494-acre industrial area. There were significant infusions of EU, national, and provincial level funds (more than €180million) that covered the costs of burying train tracks, building a public tram and setting up new energy and telecommunications services. But innovative market mechanisms, such as density bonuses and exactions for infrastructure, were used to generate private revenue.

The transformation of the physical space was paired with efforts to create a new knowledge and innovation hub. After studying the city’s economic and geographic advantages, leaders of 22@Barcelona decide to pursue five industry clusters: media, medical technologies, information and communications technology, energy, and design. City leaders then did intensive work to lure universities, institutions, companies and organisations to the district, and also created meeting and residential spaces for specific industries, a technology centre, incubators, and residences for students and workers.

We could highlight other efforts elsewhere: Copenhagen’s push to be at the vanguard of sustainable development has yielded many economic and fiscal benefits. Turin’s transformation from an auto-dependent economy to a diversified one serves as the model for Detroit. Munich’s powerful network of world-class firms, advanced research institutions and high-tech centres make it a world leader in innovation.

Options for English cities and regions

England is far more centralised than Spain, Germany or the Netherlands. While there has been considerable devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the UK government has kept hold of the economy-shaping agenda, devolving very little to English local governments. Post-recession, the governing coalition embraced devolution, rhetorically at least, as means for delivering government more efficiently. Part of this stems from the success of giving London more control over regional economic policymaking in 2000, which has led to the Localism Act and the creation of local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) between business, political and civic leaders.

But while the central government is travelling in the right direction on devolution, it is moving at a very deliberate pace. Lord Heseltine’s report on economic growth and devolution called for “a very significant devolution of funding from central government to local enterprise partnerships so that government investment in economic development is tailored directly to the individual challenges and opportunities of our communities, and can be augmented by private sector investment”.Lord Heseltine called for £49bn over four years; the government has instead allocated £2bn a year over the next five years into a Single Local Growth Fund. Much of the money in the local growth fund had already been allocated to cities and regions and it is not at all clear how much of their share a city or region will be able to spend flexibly (ie, how much is really ‘un-ringfenced’). At the same time, the central government plans to cut local authority budgets by 10%.

Given this tepid commitment to devolution, the challenge for England’s cities and regions is to use the resources that they do have in a way that convinces central government that devolution is a good bet for economic growth. That means creating economic growth plans that not only wisely use the existing funds, but make a bold case for what LEPs and local governments intend to do. Alexandra Jones of Centre for Cities describes this as “looking beyond the single pot” and “setting the agenda for the future”.

The City Deals programme, which started in 2011, indicates what networks of metropolitan leaders might do with more flexibility. As with the proposed single pot, City Deals gives cities greater control of central government funds for transportation, housing and apprenticeships. Greater Manchester’s City Deal will establish a low-carbon hub and a regional strategy to achieve a 48% reduction in carbon emissions in the urban area by 2020. The central government in London agreed to support the region’s applications for funding from the EU and to commit national funds from the UK Green Investment Bank to a joint green-venture fund. The fund will have the authority and flexibility to develop an investment portfolio in areas from retrofits to public buildings and houses. In October 2012, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change signed a memorandum of understanding that outlined goals and division of responsibilities between the metro and the central government for implementing the low carbon hub and realising the region’s carbon reduction goal.

The Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP (GBSLEP) has created a careful outline for how it intends to organise itself differently and the projects it will prioritise to take advantage of the Single Local Growth Fund opportunities. These projects include infrastructure investments, projects that strengthen the innovation potential of sectors such as advanced industries and life sciences, and skills training that connects with employer needs. The GBSLEP plan, created in consultation with Lord Heseltine, clearly demonstrates that networks of local leaders approach problems in a significantly more integrated fashion than national leaders. For example, the central government has declared that it will not devolve innovation funding, focusing instead on transport, housing, and skills. But Greater Birmingham and Solihull business and elected leaders understand that innovation is a priority for their economy and hope to use single pot funds as they can to support innovation. They support, for example, land development around the city’s Advanced Manufacturing Hub and the clean-up of contaminated sites adjacent to a major hospital and Birmingham University.

English cities and regions are without a doubt at a disadvantage compared to cities and regions elsewhere when it comes to implementing the metropolitan revolution. But, given the larger trends in the economy and the importance of designing city and regional answers to city and regional challenges, they have no choice but to push on and convince the central government to devolve more. The competitiveness of English regions, and the larger UK economy, depends on it.

Putting cities at the forefront

It is a disruptive act for cities and metropolitan areas to assert themselves as the engines of national growth and prosperity. Nations, states, and provinces are the largest single investors in cities and metropolitan areas, their infrastructure, their residents (particularly disadvantaged ones) and their leading-edge institutions. They set the regulatory rules of the game by which cities and metros (and their companies and core institutions) grow advanced industries, attract global talent and compete on the world stage. It is impossible to ignore these higher levels of government, even as local leaders condemn their inaction and unreliability or decry their prescriptive and intrusive tendencies.

The point of the metropolitan revolution is not that these so-called higher levels of government do not matter. Rather, the point is that they must act in service of their metropolitan engines. Every metropolitan leader – and every national leader – must ask how national governments, local governments and other actors should interact to coproduce the economy. Waves of economic change have put cities and metros at the forefront. Will national governments ignore these changes, or will they recognise that supporting metropolitan areas is the new imperative?

[i] The Eindhoven story is based largely on the excellent account given in Leo Van Den Berg, Jan Van Der Meer, Alexander H.J. Otgaar, and Carolien J.M. Speller in “Brainport: Eindhoven” in Empowering metropolitan regions through new forms of cooperation: New perspectives on metropolitan governance (European Institute for Comparative Urban Research, 2006) and on Ana Maria Fernandez-Maldonado “Combining design and high-tech in knowledge cities: the case of Eindhoven,” Presented at for the Knowledge Cities World Summit 2010 Conference, Melbourne, 16-19 November 2010.

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, it's clear that cities and metropolitan areas need to find their own economic game changer to create jobs, unlock value, and attract private investment.

Philadelphia could supercharge its economy by growing a globally significant Innovation District.

It is no secret that Philadelphia needs to do a better job of turning ideas into new companies and new products. A 2011 study by Select Greater Philadelphia ranks the region as a top-five research and development center nationally, yet, in measures of commercialization, the city doesn't perform as highly. It falls to 11th in total venture capital, and is 12th in patent production, behind not only San Francisco and Boston, but also Detroit. Its rate of patents per worker is very low: 71.

But Philadelphia has an underappreciated advantage - not just a wealth of advanced research institutions and consortia, but also their proximity to each other. This density can create an environment - an innovation district - in which investors, inventors, entrepreneurs, and workers can interact spontaneously and frequently with each other.

Innovation districts, unlike the exurban science parks of the last century, cluster anchor institutions and cutting-edge companies alongside smaller entrepreneurial firms, mixed-use housing, office, retail, and 21st-century amenities and transportation. These districts reflect the growing penchant for firms to practice "open innovation" and work closely with networks of firms, universities, and supporting institutions. These districts also provide what talented workers increasingly want in the places they live and work: livability, walkability, and transit connectivity.

The core of a world-class innovation district in Philadelphia could be the institutions of University City. There is a rich opportunity to further capitalize on the constellation of innovation assets along a tract that runs north and west of 30th Street Station, the iconic gateway to the city. This area's institutions - the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the University City Science Center - are a large part of the city's 21st-century economic base and potential, and close by are Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nascent growth along the lower Schuylkill.

Momentum is already under way. First, Stephen Tang, president and CEO of the University City Science Center, has started to cluster the right ingredients - incubator space, collaborative venues, social networking, product competitions, technical mentoring, and even the residential space that creates a 24/7 neighborhood - at the center, providing a foundation for further activity along Market Street and beyond. These efforts can be amplified by the creation of special regional funds dedicated to providing capital to inventors. The tax reform pushed by Mayor Nutter and others has already made the city more attractive to investment firms; continued reforms would further remove disincentives for start-up companies to locate in the district.

Second, this area can make a one-of-a-kind offer to businesses and residents alike. Drexel President John Fry's ambitious plan to recapture land now covered by railroad tracks has all the makings of a signature, transformative investment. On a smaller scale, replicating the complex elements that Paul Levy, president and CEO of the Center City District, and others have used to create one of the most distinctive downtowns in the country - a mash-up of housing types, restaurants, retail options, well-maintained public spaces, pleasing streetscapes, and transportation access - is essential to growing an Innovation District. The city can help, providing flexible zoning and land use, safe streets, and efficient services. The federal and state governments, if they are smart, can provide strategic infrastructure investments.

Finally, the Innovation District would only reach its fullest potential by creating opportunities for the residents who live nearby. It would not solve the School District's budget crisis, but it could offer smaller-scale benefits, such as an opportunity to build a school-to-work pipeline. Many jobs in the innovation economy require customized technical training in high schools or community colleges. Imagine the impact of a high school dedicated to providing students with skills and apprenticeships in health care and biomedical research institutions and companies. This is the path to creating quality jobs with good wages for a population that is normally left behind as cities revive.

Five years after the Great Recession, Philadelphia faces major economic, fiscal, and social challenges. But it also has enviable assets and advantages that, with strategic focus and investment, could make it an engine for growth for decades to come. A world-renowned Innovation District would truly be a game changer for the Philadelphia region.

Authors

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, it's clear that cities and metropolitan areas need to find their own economic game changer to create jobs, unlock value, and attract private investment.

Philadelphia could supercharge its economy by growing a globally significant Innovation District.

It is no secret that Philadelphia needs to do a better job of turning ideas into new companies and new products. A 2011 study by Select Greater Philadelphia ranks the region as a top-five research and development center nationally, yet, in measures of commercialization, the city doesn't perform as highly. It falls to 11th in total venture capital, and is 12th in patent production, behind not only San Francisco and Boston, but also Detroit. Its rate of patents per worker is very low: 71.

But Philadelphia has an underappreciated advantage - not just a wealth of advanced research institutions and consortia, but also their proximity to each other. This density can create an environment - an innovation district - in which investors, inventors, entrepreneurs, and workers can interact spontaneously and frequently with each other.

Innovation districts, unlike the exurban science parks of the last century, cluster anchor institutions and cutting-edge companies alongside smaller entrepreneurial firms, mixed-use housing, office, retail, and 21st-century amenities and transportation. These districts reflect the growing penchant for firms to practice "open innovation" and work closely with networks of firms, universities, and supporting institutions. These districts also provide what talented workers increasingly want in the places they live and work: livability, walkability, and transit connectivity.

The core of a world-class innovation district in Philadelphia could be the institutions of University City. There is a rich opportunity to further capitalize on the constellation of innovation assets along a tract that runs north and west of 30th Street Station, the iconic gateway to the city. This area's institutions - the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the University City Science Center - are a large part of the city's 21st-century economic base and potential, and close by are Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nascent growth along the lower Schuylkill.

Momentum is already under way. First, Stephen Tang, president and CEO of the University City Science Center, has started to cluster the right ingredients - incubator space, collaborative venues, social networking, product competitions, technical mentoring, and even the residential space that creates a 24/7 neighborhood - at the center, providing a foundation for further activity along Market Street and beyond. These efforts can be amplified by the creation of special regional funds dedicated to providing capital to inventors. The tax reform pushed by Mayor Nutter and others has already made the city more attractive to investment firms; continued reforms would further remove disincentives for start-up companies to locate in the district.

Second, this area can make a one-of-a-kind offer to businesses and residents alike. Drexel President John Fry's ambitious plan to recapture land now covered by railroad tracks has all the makings of a signature, transformative investment. On a smaller scale, replicating the complex elements that Paul Levy, president and CEO of the Center City District, and others have used to create one of the most distinctive downtowns in the country - a mash-up of housing types, restaurants, retail options, well-maintained public spaces, pleasing streetscapes, and transportation access - is essential to growing an Innovation District. The city can help, providing flexible zoning and land use, safe streets, and efficient services. The federal and state governments, if they are smart, can provide strategic infrastructure investments.

Finally, the Innovation District would only reach its fullest potential by creating opportunities for the residents who live nearby. It would not solve the School District's budget crisis, but it could offer smaller-scale benefits, such as an opportunity to build a school-to-work pipeline. Many jobs in the innovation economy require customized technical training in high schools or community colleges. Imagine the impact of a high school dedicated to providing students with skills and apprenticeships in health care and biomedical research institutions and companies. This is the path to creating quality jobs with good wages for a population that is normally left behind as cities revive.

Five years after the Great Recession, Philadelphia faces major economic, fiscal, and social challenges. But it also has enviable assets and advantages that, with strategic focus and investment, could make it an engine for growth for decades to come. A world-renowned Innovation District would truly be a game changer for the Philadelphia region.

"With D.C. Inertia, Urban Leaders Must Innovate" was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 13, 2013.

During San Francisco's Gold Rush years, it could take more than three months for a message to reach the federal government in Washington, D.C. Local leaders essentially were left on their own to manage a city whose population grew from 1,000 to 25,000 from early 1848 to the end of 1849.

Today, 160 years later, San Francisco - and cities and metropolitan areas across the country - are once again on their own, though it's a result of federal inaction rather than isolation.

While the national economy continues to suffer the lingering effects of the Great Recession - including a jobs deficit of nearly 10 million and a poor or near-poor population that has ballooned to more than 107 million - the federal government continues to bicker and delay, leaving local leaders to pick up the slack.

This transfer of responsibility is the result of not only cyclical partisan squabbling, but also a structural change in the fiscal reality of the federal budget. With a rapidly aging national population, federal spending on entitlement programs is projected to rise by $1.6 trillion annually by 2023, while spending on critical investments around education, infrastructure, housing and innovation remain stagnant.

The good news is that across the country, smart metropolitan leaders are stepping up to grow jobs and make their economies more prosperous.

Networks of philanthropic and business interests and elected and civic leaders are coming together to design, deliver and finance economy-shaping initiatives in the face of this federal retreat. In many ways, this comes as no surprise - metropolitan areas are the engines of the national economy.

The top 100 metros in the country sit on just one-eighth of our land mass, but house two-thirds of the nation's population and generate three-quarters of our gross domestic product.

In California, 85 percent of the state lives in its 10 largest metropolitan areas, which produce 89 percent of the state's economic output. Metro areas also concentrate the key levers of our national competitiveness - skilled workers and entrepreneurs, ports and airports, universities and advanced industries.

The United States is fundamentally a metropolitan nation - and increasingly one in which Washington will do less and metro areas will do more. This metropolitan revolution is already playing out across the country.

In Portland, Ore., for example, realizing that most future economic growth will occur outside our borders, local leaders aren't waiting for the federal government to lead on trade policy. A network of elected, business and civic leaders united behind a single vision for greater Portland.

They developed a regional export plan that focused on promoting their expertise in building sustainable cities, strengthening their electronics manufacturing, and providing export support for small manufacturers. By opening new markets abroad in the rapidly urbanizing developing world, Portland aims to double its total exports, a feat the region already accomplished from 2003-10.

In New York City, in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the financial collapse, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city's economic development agency realized the need to diversify the economy. A network of stakeholders from across industries agreed that the city needed more tech talent.

The resulting Applied Sciences NYC initiative will bring three world-class technology campuses into the city, generating an estimated $33 billion in potential long-term economic impact from a public investment of only $130 million.

Even in Detroit, where both federal and local government have long been absent, local stakeholders - public, private and philanthropic - are renewing the city from its core, bringing jobs, residents and business back to a burgeoning 4.3-square-mile innovation district.

In a recent milestone, this network raised more than $100 million to fund the vast majority of the construction of a streetcar line between the revitalized downtown and midtown neighborhoods - a move that then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called "unprecedented."

Metro areas can't wait for the federal government to ride to the rescue. These types of game-changing initiatives will become increasingly common. Local governments will find themselves responsible for more and more of the factors that make their own places competitive. Together, their actions and intentions will constitute a national competitiveness agenda, but one that's not concocted in and delivered by Washington.

San Francisco - and cities around the country - need to step up.

Identify the network of leaders who can champion innovative solutions for your community. Set a vision that draws on the strengths of your distinctive local economy. Then, design and deliver that key investment - that game-changer - that will ensure a prosperous and opportunity-filled future for your community.

Authors

"With D.C. Inertia, Urban Leaders Must Innovate" was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 13, 2013.

During San Francisco's Gold Rush years, it could take more than three months for a message to reach the federal government in Washington, D.C. Local leaders essentially were left on their own to manage a city whose population grew from 1,000 to 25,000 from early 1848 to the end of 1849.

Today, 160 years later, San Francisco - and cities and metropolitan areas across the country - are once again on their own, though it's a result of federal inaction rather than isolation.

While the national economy continues to suffer the lingering effects of the Great Recession - including a jobs deficit of nearly 10 million and a poor or near-poor population that has ballooned to more than 107 million - the federal government continues to bicker and delay, leaving local leaders to pick up the slack.

This transfer of responsibility is the result of not only cyclical partisan squabbling, but also a structural change in the fiscal reality of the federal budget. With a rapidly aging national population, federal spending on entitlement programs is projected to rise by $1.6 trillion annually by 2023, while spending on critical investments around education, infrastructure, housing and innovation remain stagnant.

The good news is that across the country, smart metropolitan leaders are stepping up to grow jobs and make their economies more prosperous.

Networks of philanthropic and business interests and elected and civic leaders are coming together to design, deliver and finance economy-shaping initiatives in the face of this federal retreat. In many ways, this comes as no surprise - metropolitan areas are the engines of the national economy.

The top 100 metros in the country sit on just one-eighth of our land mass, but house two-thirds of the nation's population and generate three-quarters of our gross domestic product.

In California, 85 percent of the state lives in its 10 largest metropolitan areas, which produce 89 percent of the state's economic output. Metro areas also concentrate the key levers of our national competitiveness - skilled workers and entrepreneurs, ports and airports, universities and advanced industries.

The United States is fundamentally a metropolitan nation - and increasingly one in which Washington will do less and metro areas will do more. This metropolitan revolution is already playing out across the country.

In Portland, Ore., for example, realizing that most future economic growth will occur outside our borders, local leaders aren't waiting for the federal government to lead on trade policy. A network of elected, business and civic leaders united behind a single vision for greater Portland.

They developed a regional export plan that focused on promoting their expertise in building sustainable cities, strengthening their electronics manufacturing, and providing export support for small manufacturers. By opening new markets abroad in the rapidly urbanizing developing world, Portland aims to double its total exports, a feat the region already accomplished from 2003-10.

In New York City, in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the financial collapse, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city's economic development agency realized the need to diversify the economy. A network of stakeholders from across industries agreed that the city needed more tech talent.

The resulting Applied Sciences NYC initiative will bring three world-class technology campuses into the city, generating an estimated $33 billion in potential long-term economic impact from a public investment of only $130 million.

Even in Detroit, where both federal and local government have long been absent, local stakeholders - public, private and philanthropic - are renewing the city from its core, bringing jobs, residents and business back to a burgeoning 4.3-square-mile innovation district.

In a recent milestone, this network raised more than $100 million to fund the vast majority of the construction of a streetcar line between the revitalized downtown and midtown neighborhoods - a move that then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called "unprecedented."

Metro areas can't wait for the federal government to ride to the rescue. These types of game-changing initiatives will become increasingly common. Local governments will find themselves responsible for more and more of the factors that make their own places competitive. Together, their actions and intentions will constitute a national competitiveness agenda, but one that's not concocted in and delivered by Washington.

San Francisco - and cities around the country - need to step up.

Identify the network of leaders who can champion innovative solutions for your community. Set a vision that draws on the strengths of your distinctive local economy. Then, design and deliver that key investment - that game-changer - that will ensure a prosperous and opportunity-filled future for your community.

Authors

]]>
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/08/28-detroit-bankruptcy-bradley-katz?rssid=bradleyj{643B09E2-58AE-480C-A924-53C565A6845B}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/65481373/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~The-One-Building-that-Explains-How-Detroit-Could-Come-Back-A-Plan-to-Foster-Innovation-Amidst-BankruptcyThe One Building that Explains How Detroit Could Come Back: A Plan to Foster Innovation Amidst Bankruptcy

The old Argonaut Building has a big place in Detroit’s history. From 1936 to 1956, it was the home of the General Motors Research Laboratory, the first in-house research & design studio in the automotive industry. The mass-produced automatic transmission was developed there, and over three decades every GM car was designed and styled in the Argonaut building. From 1956 to 1999, the building housed Argonaut Realty, GM’s real estate arm. But for the next decade, the somber 11-story structure, designed by famed architect Albert Kahn and built to support the weight of new cars on upper floors, was empty. So were many of the other buildings where people made, designed, or sold cars, or prepared legal documents, or saw patients, or did much of the everyday work of Detroit.

For most observers of the city, where an emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, filed for bankruptcy on July 18, that’s where the story ends—empty buildings, lost jobs, and a pervasive sense of decay and defeat.

But in reality, the Argonaut building has come back to life, re-imagined and re-named the Taubman Center for Design Education. Today, a small company called Shinola produces watches and bicycles, curiously old-fashioned yet hipster-ready objects, in a 30,000 square foot watch factory and smaller custom bike workshop. The highly regarded College for Creative Studies also uses the building for its graduate and undergraduate programs in advertising and various aspects of design. There is also a charter school on site, promoting arts and design education for 6th through 12th graders.

Like the Argonaut, the core of Detroit, encompassing the Midtown and Downtown neighborhoods are also undergoing a revival. Thirty-seven percent of the jobs (about 120,000) in the city of Detroit are in these neighborhoods, which take up only three percent of the city’s land. Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans and various other businesses, has invested $1 billion in downtown office buildings. Approximately 10,000 new jobs have come to downtown in the last two years. While it doesn’t show up in official data, people on the ground suggest that the biggest surge in jobs has been in the last year or so, indicating that the area is only gaining momentum. From 2009 to 2011, the city as a whole lost jobs, but Midtown and Downtown saw a 5 percent jump. Thousands of new workers are now downtown, including companies like Blue Cross and Compuware that relocated from the suburbs.

People also want to live in midtown and downtown: Rental occupancy rates are higher than 90 percent in both neighborhoods and home sale prices are much higher than the rest of the city. Finally, there is new investment from private companies, including Whole Foods, which opened a midtown location in June 2013.

This investment and activity has benefits for Detroit as a whole, by creating jobs, drawing in residents, and generating tax revenue for a city that is greatly in need of all three. For example, almost three-quarters of Whole Foods employees are Detroit residents. And Midtown and Downtown have the potential to do even more for the city, and the wider Detroit region. The metropolitan economy needs to generate new ideas, products, and services that the rest of the country and the rest of the world wants to buy. Midtown and downtown could become the country’s next innovation district, where the density of innovative institutions and companies—hospitals, universities, research centers, clusters of tech and creative firms, plus resources for entrepreneurs and new businesses—begets still more new businesses, new products, new export opportunities, and new jobs.

Over time, this economic activity, and the new apartment buildings and retail strips that it draws, spread into surrounding neighborhoods. This is how the Detroit economy could, slowly but surely, regain traction. Getting the city’s fiscal house in order is only part of the story.

Innovation district is a relatively new term just beginning to gain currency among political, business, and civic leaders. Just a handful of places in the world have used the term to self-consciously describe a concentration of innovative institutions and resources that together create a “more than the sum of their parts” effect. In Barcelona, for example, the new 22@Barcelona innovation district transformed a 494-acre industrial area scarred and separated from the rest of the city by nineteenth-century railroad tracks. In less than a decade, 4,500 firms have located in the area, and there are thousands of housing units, plus university campuses, tech businesses, and new spaces for start-ups.

In turns out that innovation and the density that city neighborhoods provide are a perfect match for each other. According to a study by the British government, “While the marginal cost of transmitting information across geographical space has fallen significantly, the marginal cost of transmitting knowledge still rises with distance. . . . Therefore, the knowledge spillover benefits of clustering in cities can be large for high-value, knowledge intensive sectors.” These knowledge-intensive sectors, including chemicals, biotechnology, telecommunications, and semiconductors have themselves recognized that they have to collaborate to compete. McKinsey & Company, for example, has noticed a move from internal R&D labs to a partnership model with “academic centers, partners, competitors, customers, venture-capital funds, and startups.”

Proximity enables constant interaction and knowledge sharing, and the effects can be staggering.

Researcher Gerry Carlino has found that the number of patents per capita increases, on average, by 20 to 30 percent for every doubling of employment density. Stuart Rosenthal and William Strange find that the intellectual spillovers—what one company or person learns from another company or person—drop off dramatically with distance. At a distance of just over a mile, the power of intellectual ferment to create another new firm or even another new job drops to one-tenth or less of what it is closer in, because “information spillovers that require frequent contact between workers may dissipate over a short distance as walking to a meeting place becomes difficult or as random encounters become rare.” Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found that even working in the same building on an academic medical campus makes a difference for scientific breakthroughs. As one of them explains, “Otherwise it’s really out of sight, out of mind.”

Unlike enterprise zones or other government-led efforts that tried to create economic activity where very little existed, innovation districts are a way to organize economic activity that is already happening. The purpose of an innovation district is to make it easier for all the actors that transform ideas into saleable products and services to connect to each other. The government is one actor in innovation districts. It can designate a district, and create special zoning regulations that make it easier to, for example, create mixed-use developments, or the right kind of flexible commercial space for nascent companies. But it’s even more critical that universities, entrepreneurs, workers, medical institutions, business incubators, and other actors commit to the idea as well, and agree to locate in district and connect to others who are also there.

It’s not clear how many jobs Detroit can expect to see from this part of the city, which is already fairly job-dense, in the future. What is clear is that, according to research, the innovation district has the best environment in the city for creating science and technology jobs that in turn lead to the creation of other kinds of jobs (including service jobs for all skill levels, from doctors to retail clerks). The Detroit Future City report, which was based on an exhaustive analysis of the economic strengths of the city’s neighborhoods, identified midtown and downtown as two key neighborhoods for additional job growth.

To truly coalesce into an innovation district, the midtown-downtown zone needs more space for innovation and collaboration. One recent report noted that “There is too little low-cost flex space for creative firms [in Midtown]. Targeted development activity is needed to support small, creative, and IT firms as well as B2B operations that support and serve large local institutions.” Sue Mosey, the head of the Midtown, Inc. development corporation says with a smile that she’s got “no end of potential” in the neighborhood. Mosey also suggests that the big innovation institutions need to do a better job of sharing their innovations with each other and seeing what results—right now, they are still more comfortable operating in silos than in collaborative networks. But the new spaces for collaboration may lead to a new mindset.

Second, existing and potential firms don’t have access to a local workforce with the skills and education they need. With a 20 percent unemployment rate in the city, the potential talent is there—but it is grossly out of line with what employers need. Existing firms and new companies could create more jobs if they had more tech-adept workers, and that in turn could stimulate the economy even more.

Maybe the best thing the innovation-district-to-be has going for it is, ironically, Detroit itself, despite the bankruptcy. According to a Los Angeles Timesstory from earlier this spring, when the CEO of Shinola took the watch to a trade show in Basel, Switzerland (where they know about watches), "People responded phenomenally….Detroit as the underdog [and] rebuilding against the odds is a powerful story, and the American story of resilience and triumph over adversity really seemed to resonate internationally.” People want to be part of Detroit’s turnaround, and to reinvent, well, invention in the city.

Detroit is drawing a new geography of innovation. Virtually every major city in this country has a strong central business district (mostly for the congregation of government, corporate headquarters, entertainment venues, and some cultural functions), a strong midtown area (where eds and meds and historic museums tend to concentrate), and a state-of-the-art transit corridor, mostly built within the past twenty years, connecting the two. Each of these discrete building blocks brings particular assets which, in turn, provide a platform for a key element of innovation district growth.

Innovation districts are the successor to the suburban science and research parks that sprung up in the leafy precincts of Raleigh-Durham, Silicon Valley, and suburban Washington, Boston and Philadelphia. While these science parks seemed like a great idea at the time, when people thought that innovation hubs needed settings that mirrored those of small liberal arts colleges, based on what we now know about proximity, idea sharing, and innovation, and the preferences of young and creative workers, it’s possible, even likely, that more places will designate innovation districts around their own university campuses or tech hubs and seek to infuse them with the benefits of density. One promising sign—as Lydia DePillis reported here a few months ago, Research Triangle Park is rezoning and remaking itself into a denser, mixed use environment. In other words, this quintessential suburban office park wants to be more like a city.

An innovation district is not just a collection of physical assets. What really makes it hum is people, not just those who live and work there, but also networks of leaders in institutions like medical centers, philanthropies, non-profits, zoning departments, and local businesses. These leaders need to be committed to connecting an inventor, an entrepreneur, and a crew of first-rate workers. They need to be knowledgeable about how to make real estate development deals happen in urban areas, using the complex public and private financing mechanisms that are often required before a market fully takes off. Even after losing more than one million residents since its peak, Detroit still has these people, and they are committed to the city’s success, now more than ever. Those networks give its innovation district a good chance of success. Detroit could show cities how to connect old assets to new innovation practices. The Argonaut building, and what surrounds it, could once again symbolize Detroit’s power and preeminence in the world of invention.

Editor's Note: This editorial was originally published on August 28, 2013 at New Republic.

Authors

The old Argonaut Building has a big place in Detroit’s history. From 1936 to 1956, it was the home of the General Motors Research Laboratory, the first in-house research & design studio in the automotive industry. The mass-produced automatic transmission was developed there, and over three decades every GM car was designed and styled in the Argonaut building. From 1956 to 1999, the building housed Argonaut Realty, GM’s real estate arm. But for the next decade, the somber 11-story structure, designed by famed architect Albert Kahn and built to support the weight of new cars on upper floors, was empty. So were many of the other buildings where people made, designed, or sold cars, or prepared legal documents, or saw patients, or did much of the everyday work of Detroit.

For most observers of the city, where an emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, filed for bankruptcy on July 18, that’s where the story ends—empty buildings, lost jobs, and a pervasive sense of decay and defeat.

But in reality, the Argonaut building has come back to life, re-imagined and re-named the Taubman Center for Design Education. Today, a small company called Shinola produces watches and bicycles, curiously old-fashioned yet hipster-ready objects, in a 30,000 square foot watch factory and smaller custom bike workshop. The highly regarded College for Creative Studies also uses the building for its graduate and undergraduate programs in advertising and various aspects of design. There is also a charter school on site, promoting arts and design education for 6th through 12th graders.

Like the Argonaut, the core of Detroit, encompassing the Midtown and Downtown neighborhoods are also undergoing a revival. Thirty-seven percent of the jobs (about 120,000) in the city of Detroit are in these neighborhoods, which take up only three percent of the city’s land. Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans and various other businesses, has invested $1 billion in downtown office buildings. Approximately 10,000 new jobs have come to downtown in the last two years. While it doesn’t show up in official data, people on the ground suggest that the biggest surge in jobs has been in the last year or so, indicating that the area is only gaining momentum. From 2009 to 2011, the city as a whole lost jobs, but Midtown and Downtown saw a 5 percent jump. Thousands of new workers are now downtown, including companies like Blue Cross and Compuware that relocated from the suburbs.

People also want to live in midtown and downtown: Rental occupancy rates are higher than 90 percent in both neighborhoods and home sale prices are much higher than the rest of the city. Finally, there is new investment from private companies, including Whole Foods, which opened a midtown location in June 2013.

This investment and activity has benefits for Detroit as a whole, by creating jobs, drawing in residents, and generating tax revenue for a city that is greatly in need of all three. For example, almost three-quarters of Whole Foods employees are Detroit residents. And Midtown and Downtown have the potential to do even more for the city, and the wider Detroit region. The metropolitan economy needs to generate new ideas, products, and services that the rest of the country and the rest of the world wants to buy. Midtown and downtown could become the country’s next innovation district, where the density of innovative institutions and companies—hospitals, universities, research centers, clusters of tech and creative firms, plus resources for entrepreneurs and new businesses—begets still more new businesses, new products, new export opportunities, and new jobs.

Over time, this economic activity, and the new apartment buildings and retail strips that it draws, spread into surrounding neighborhoods. This is how the Detroit economy could, slowly but surely, regain traction. Getting the city’s fiscal house in order is only part of the story.

Innovation district is a relatively new term just beginning to gain currency among political, business, and civic leaders. Just a handful of places in the world have used the term to self-consciously describe a concentration of innovative institutions and resources that together create a “more than the sum of their parts” effect. In Barcelona, for example, the new 22@Barcelona innovation district transformed a 494-acre industrial area scarred and separated from the rest of the city by nineteenth-century railroad tracks. In less than a decade, 4,500 firms have located in the area, and there are thousands of housing units, plus university campuses, tech businesses, and new spaces for start-ups.

In turns out that innovation and the density that city neighborhoods provide are a perfect match for each other. According to a study by the British government, “While the marginal cost of transmitting information across geographical space has fallen significantly, the marginal cost of transmitting knowledge still rises with distance. . . . Therefore, the knowledge spillover benefits of clustering in cities can be large for high-value, knowledge intensive sectors.” These knowledge-intensive sectors, including chemicals, biotechnology, telecommunications, and semiconductors have themselves recognized that they have to collaborate to compete. McKinsey & Company, for example, has noticed a move from internal R&D labs to a partnership model with “academic centers, partners, competitors, customers, venture-capital funds, and startups.”

Proximity enables constant interaction and knowledge sharing, and the effects can be staggering.

Researcher Gerry Carlino has found that the number of patents per capita increases, on average, by 20 to 30 percent for every doubling of employment density. Stuart Rosenthal and William Strange find that the intellectual spillovers—what one company or person learns from another company or person—drop off dramatically with distance. At a distance of just over a mile, the power of intellectual ferment to create another new firm or even another new job drops to one-tenth or less of what it is closer in, because “information spillovers that require frequent contact between workers may dissipate over a short distance as walking to a meeting place becomes difficult or as random encounters become rare.” Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found that even working in the same building on an academic medical campus makes a difference for scientific breakthroughs. As one of them explains, “Otherwise it’s really out of sight, out of mind.”

Unlike enterprise zones or other government-led efforts that tried to create economic activity where very little existed, innovation districts are a way to organize economic activity that is already happening. The purpose of an innovation district is to make it easier for all the actors that transform ideas into saleable products and services to connect to each other. The government is one actor in innovation districts. It can designate a district, and create special zoning regulations that make it easier to, for example, create mixed-use developments, or the right kind of flexible commercial space for nascent companies. But it’s even more critical that universities, entrepreneurs, workers, medical institutions, business incubators, and other actors commit to the idea as well, and agree to locate in district and connect to others who are also there.

It’s not clear how many jobs Detroit can expect to see from this part of the city, which is already fairly job-dense, in the future. What is clear is that, according to research, the innovation district has the best environment in the city for creating science and technology jobs that in turn lead to the creation of other kinds of jobs (including service jobs for all skill levels, from doctors to retail clerks). The Detroit Future City report, which was based on an exhaustive analysis of the economic strengths of the city’s neighborhoods, identified midtown and downtown as two key neighborhoods for additional job growth.

To truly coalesce into an innovation district, the midtown-downtown zone needs more space for innovation and collaboration. One recent report noted that “There is too little low-cost flex space for creative firms [in Midtown]. Targeted development activity is needed to support small, creative, and IT firms as well as B2B operations that support and serve large local institutions.” Sue Mosey, the head of the Midtown, Inc. development corporation says with a smile that she’s got “no end of potential” in the neighborhood. Mosey also suggests that the big innovation institutions need to do a better job of sharing their innovations with each other and seeing what results—right now, they are still more comfortable operating in silos than in collaborative networks. But the new spaces for collaboration may lead to a new mindset.

Second, existing and potential firms don’t have access to a local workforce with the skills and education they need. With a 20 percent unemployment rate in the city, the potential talent is there—but it is grossly out of line with what employers need. Existing firms and new companies could create more jobs if they had more tech-adept workers, and that in turn could stimulate the economy even more.

Maybe the best thing the innovation-district-to-be has going for it is, ironically, Detroit itself, despite the bankruptcy. According to a Los Angeles Timesstory from earlier this spring, when the CEO of Shinola took the watch to a trade show in Basel, Switzerland (where they know about watches), "People responded phenomenally….Detroit as the underdog [and] rebuilding against the odds is a powerful story, and the American story of resilience and triumph over adversity really seemed to resonate internationally.” People want to be part of Detroit’s turnaround, and to reinvent, well, invention in the city.

Detroit is drawing a new geography of innovation. Virtually every major city in this country has a strong central business district (mostly for the congregation of government, corporate headquarters, entertainment venues, and some cultural functions), a strong midtown area (where eds and meds and historic museums tend to concentrate), and a state-of-the-art transit corridor, mostly built within the past twenty years, connecting the two. Each of these discrete building blocks brings particular assets which, in turn, provide a platform for a key element of innovation district growth.

Innovation districts are the successor to the suburban science and research parks that sprung up in the leafy precincts of Raleigh-Durham, Silicon Valley, and suburban Washington, Boston and Philadelphia. While these science parks seemed like a great idea at the time, when people thought that innovation hubs needed settings that mirrored those of small liberal arts colleges, based on what we now know about proximity, idea sharing, and innovation, and the preferences of young and creative workers, it’s possible, even likely, that more places will designate innovation districts around their own university campuses or tech hubs and seek to infuse them with the benefits of density. One promising sign—as Lydia DePillis reported here a few months ago, Research Triangle Park is rezoning and remaking itself into a denser, mixed use environment. In other words, this quintessential suburban office park wants to be more like a city.

An innovation district is not just a collection of physical assets. What really makes it hum is people, not just those who live and work there, but also networks of leaders in institutions like medical centers, philanthropies, non-profits, zoning departments, and local businesses. These leaders need to be committed to connecting an inventor, an entrepreneur, and a crew of first-rate workers. They need to be knowledgeable about how to make real estate development deals happen in urban areas, using the complex public and private financing mechanisms that are often required before a market fully takes off. Even after losing more than one million residents since its peak, Detroit still has these people, and they are committed to the city’s success, now more than ever. Those networks give its innovation district a good chance of success. Detroit could show cities how to connect old assets to new innovation practices. The Argonaut building, and what surrounds it, could once again symbolize Detroit’s power and preeminence in the world of invention.

Editor's Note: This editorial was originally published on August 28, 2013 at New Republic.

New York’s upcoming mayoral election is a pivotal one, and not just because Mayor Bloomberg is leaving office after 12 intense years. This election also coincides with a remarkable shift in power and leadership in the country as a whole, which is radically altering and elevating the role and responsibility of mayors.

New York City’s mayor, executive of the nation’s largest city by far, should be among the leaders of this new, ambitious group of public chief executives.

It is no secret that U.S. cities face enormous challenges. The country needs to gain 10 million jobs to make up for the jobs lost in the Great Recession and to keep up with population growth; the vast majority of those jobs will be created in cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas. We also need better jobs to counter the sharp growth in poverty and near-poverty: Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor and near-poor in the United States increased from 81 million to 107 million.

New York has not been immune to these trends. The city’s unemployment rate is 8.4%, over one-fifth of its residents live in poverty, and only about 30% of the students who graduate from its public high schools are prepared to start either college or a career.

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that cities, suburbs and towns will need to grapple with these and other difficulties largely without help from the federal government, which is mired in partisanship and barely able to accomplish the most basic tasks, like passing a budget.

In other words, mayors can no longer be content to be good managers of public services. Instead, they must step into the void and engage networks — within the city, across the country and around the world.

This means voters should look for three essential characteristics in the next mayor.

First, New York’s new mayor has to be able to convene groups of city stakeholders who can help him or her define problems and produce solutions.

For example, when Bloomberg sought to diversify the city’s economy after the 2008 crash, his Economic Development Corporation sought input from 300 business leaders and more than two dozen community groups, asking them what New York needed to move forward. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel turned to World Business Chicago and its network of leaders to create the Blueprint for Jobs and Economic Growth that is driving his economic agenda.

Second, New York’s next mayor has to galvanize other mayors in the United States to make progress on the issues that matter most to them. This is not easy; Bloomberg played an essential role rallying mayors on gun control and immigration, only to see the federal government dither and delay. But success is possible. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa created a national coalition on transit funding reform and changed federal law.

The next mayor should be prepared to take a leadership role helping cities get stuff done without engaging the federal government — by, for example, bringing other mayors together with financial experts to invent new ways of evaluating and financing infrastructure.

Finally, New York’s next mayor needs to be ready to go global. Global urbanization is the dominant trend in the world today. For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population is now living in towns and cities.

The planet’s economy is not only about nation states; it is increasingly a network of trading cities. These cities (actually metropolitan areas) link to each other through their commercial ties, learn shared lessons from each other on how to grapple with urbanization and can leverage their power in their home nations and globally.

New York’s mayor needs an aggressive trade strategy focusing on everything from building up the city’s tradable sectors to improving ports and airports. Any candidate who says, “That’s up to the Port Authority” or makes a similar excuse simply isn’t right for the job.

The business, civic and elected leadership of Portland, Ore., has an actionable plan to double exports in the next five years, which will add more than 100,000 jobs to that region’s economy. New York City needs a similar agenda that is at once ambitious and specific.

The mayor’s job is bigger than ever — not only driving down crime and improving schools, not only managing a massive budget and staff, but thinking outside the box and outside the city’s borders. Remember that next month — and in November.

Authors

New York’s upcoming mayoral election is a pivotal one, and not just because Mayor Bloomberg is leaving office after 12 intense years. This election also coincides with a remarkable shift in power and leadership in the country as a whole, which is radically altering and elevating the role and responsibility of mayors.

New York City’s mayor, executive of the nation’s largest city by far, should be among the leaders of this new, ambitious group of public chief executives.

It is no secret that U.S. cities face enormous challenges. The country needs to gain 10 million jobs to make up for the jobs lost in the Great Recession and to keep up with population growth; the vast majority of those jobs will be created in cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas. We also need better jobs to counter the sharp growth in poverty and near-poverty: Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor and near-poor in the United States increased from 81 million to 107 million.

New York has not been immune to these trends. The city’s unemployment rate is 8.4%, over one-fifth of its residents live in poverty, and only about 30% of the students who graduate from its public high schools are prepared to start either college or a career.

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that cities, suburbs and towns will need to grapple with these and other difficulties largely without help from the federal government, which is mired in partisanship and barely able to accomplish the most basic tasks, like passing a budget.

In other words, mayors can no longer be content to be good managers of public services. Instead, they must step into the void and engage networks — within the city, across the country and around the world.

This means voters should look for three essential characteristics in the next mayor.

First, New York’s new mayor has to be able to convene groups of city stakeholders who can help him or her define problems and produce solutions.

For example, when Bloomberg sought to diversify the city’s economy after the 2008 crash, his Economic Development Corporation sought input from 300 business leaders and more than two dozen community groups, asking them what New York needed to move forward. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel turned to World Business Chicago and its network of leaders to create the Blueprint for Jobs and Economic Growth that is driving his economic agenda.

Second, New York’s next mayor has to galvanize other mayors in the United States to make progress on the issues that matter most to them. This is not easy; Bloomberg played an essential role rallying mayors on gun control and immigration, only to see the federal government dither and delay. But success is possible. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa created a national coalition on transit funding reform and changed federal law.

The next mayor should be prepared to take a leadership role helping cities get stuff done without engaging the federal government — by, for example, bringing other mayors together with financial experts to invent new ways of evaluating and financing infrastructure.

Finally, New York’s next mayor needs to be ready to go global. Global urbanization is the dominant trend in the world today. For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population is now living in towns and cities.

The planet’s economy is not only about nation states; it is increasingly a network of trading cities. These cities (actually metropolitan areas) link to each other through their commercial ties, learn shared lessons from each other on how to grapple with urbanization and can leverage their power in their home nations and globally.

New York’s mayor needs an aggressive trade strategy focusing on everything from building up the city’s tradable sectors to improving ports and airports. Any candidate who says, “That’s up to the Port Authority” or makes a similar excuse simply isn’t right for the job.

The business, civic and elected leadership of Portland, Ore., has an actionable plan to double exports in the next five years, which will add more than 100,000 jobs to that region’s economy. New York City needs a similar agenda that is at once ambitious and specific.

The mayor’s job is bigger than ever — not only driving down crime and improving schools, not only managing a massive budget and staff, but thinking outside the box and outside the city’s borders. Remember that next month — and in November.

Authors

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http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/07/28-metro-revolution-tom-friedman-mayor?rssid=bradleyj{CBC6770B-7BAF-4160-AC9D-752B38C6CCEE}http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/65481375/0/brookingsrss/experts/bradleyj~I-Want-to-Be-a-Mayor-Says-Tom-Friedman"I Want to Be a Mayor," Says Tom Friedman

If you want to be optimistic about America today, "stand on your head," says columnist Tom Friedman in The New York Times. Writing about our new book, The Metropolitan Revolution, Friedman notes that—as described in its pages—with Washington paralyzed, U.S. cities and metropolitan areas are emerging as the "great laboratories and engines of our economy," making things look a whole lot better from the bottom up.

Authors

If you want to be optimistic about America today, "stand on your head," says columnist Tom Friedman in The New York Times. Writing about our new book, The Metropolitan Revolution, Friedman notes that—as described in its pages—with Washington paralyzed, U.S. cities and metropolitan areas are emerging as the "great laboratories and engines of our economy," making things look a whole lot better from the bottom up.

Americans are riveted by Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy—the largest in the country’s history. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Detroit emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr are engaged in a historic intervention with serious implications for Detroit’s citizens and businesses, pensioners and creditors. Yet they know that getting Detroit’s fiscal house in order—as difficult as that is—will not be sufficient to renew Detroit. Detroit needs a strong growth strategy to complement the state’s intervention on debt and deficits. Absent an economic revival, the city’s fiscal problems will be recurring and inescapable.

The good news, lost amidst the screaming headlines over bankruptcy, is that market momentum in Detroit’s core is real and palpable and provides a strong foundation for future growth. In fact, the broadly supported Detroit Future City plan provides an excellent blueprint for growth and investment. Now is not the time for investors outside Detroit merely to observe or monitor the dramatic intervention of the state and the bankruptcy process. Rather, this is the time to engage in a productive and creative fashion.

Like many American cities, Detroit has a strong core. Its 7.2 square miles, encompassing Downtown, Midtown, New Center and a handful of other neighborhoods in a city of 138 square miles, is seeing a surge of private and civic investment and business and residential growth. In this relatively small area of the city there are roughly 5,400 businesses, employing more than 135,000 workers. Add to that the 29,000 students at Wayne State University, and the numbers represent a remarkable opportunity to catalyze growth in businesses, the residential market and all that follows.

Market momentum, against all odds, is already apparent. The downtown is being transformed by Dan Gilbert, founder of mortgage provider Quicken Loans. In 2007, Gilbert moved the firm’s headquarters from suburban Farmington Hills to downtown Detroit. Since then, he has brought more than 7,000 employees downtown and purchased more than 15 buildings and two parking garages in the downtown area. The firm is now the third-largest landholder in the city of Detroit, behind the city government and General Motors. Gilbert’s purchases and building plans are all part of his Detroit 2.0 revival vision, “a lively live-work-play district in the heart of the city based around entrepreneurial companies in the digital economy.”

Gilbert’s acquisitions, of course, built on incomparable assets: The downtown is a National Register Historic District with more than 50 landmarked buildings.

Elsewhere, the Kresge Foundation contributed $50 million toward a major public-private reclamation and redevelopment project along the city’s riverfront.

Invest Detroit, the Detroit Downtown Partnership, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation have nurtured these deals and the broader revival for years.

Gilbert’s confidence has sparked decisions by other firms to expand their downtown presence and a new subculture of entrepreneurial tech-oriented start-ups, such as Digerati, Detroit Labs, and Stik, has emerged in the shadow of larger firms.

Similarly, Sue Mosey, president of the community development organization Midtown Detroit Inc., is leading a revival of that neighborhood driven by four major anchor institutions—Henry Ford Hospital, the Detroit Medical Center, Wayne State University, and the College for Creative Studies. Over the past decade, Mosey and a dedicated network of institutional partners have helped drive $1.8 billion in public and private investment in midtown.

Highlights include the following:

Henry Ford Hospital recently finished a $300 million renovation and in 2010 announced a $1 billion expansion with commercial, retail, and housing space.

The Detroit Medical Center, employing about 3,000 physicians, has invested $850 million over the past several years, including a new heart hospital and an outpatient pediatric facility.

Wayne State University, the largest public research university in the city of Detroit, is building a $90 million biomedical research facility to link up with researchers at the Henry Ford Health System and is home to TechTown, a technology research center and business incubator.

The College for Creative Studies, one of the top design colleges in the world, expanded in 2008 with a $145 million redevelopment of the historic Argonaut Building (formerly General Motors’ first research and design studio).

The building of M1 Rail, a 3.3 mile light-rail line from downtown to Grand Boulevard at the upper edge of Midtown Detroit, is the latest infusion of capital into the community. A consortium of public, private, and philanthropic institutions—including General Motors and Chrysler, the Kresge Foundation, and major individual backers such as Dan Gilbert, Roger Penske (the CEO of Penske Racing), and Peter Karmanos (the CEO of Compuware)—have committed more than $100 million to construction of the project.

In January 2013, the federal government contributed $25 million to the rail project, an act made possible only after the state authorized Detroit Regional Transit Authority was created. As U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said on making the announcement, “Nobody in America, no community, has ever raised $100 million for a project like this. That is unprecedented.... They’ve done everything we’ve asked them to do.”

That underscores that the federal government should also be a partner—not a leader, not a savior, but a partner—in the revival of the Motor City. It has a stake in the success of the city, because it invests in the city in large and small ways—through smart investments in people through the Earned Income Tax Credit, in universities and corporations through advanced research and development grants and contracts, and in businesses through SBA, Export-Import Bank and FHA loans.

City mismanagement and drift has meant that a small portion of federal funds (e.g., in Community Development Block Grants) have been either unspent or misallocated.

The federal government should move quickly to either shift responsibility for the allocation of these funds out of the city government and to a capable partner, like the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, which already handles most of the real estate development responsibilities for Detroit, or make funds more flexible, as the federal government generally does in the aftermath of natural disasters.

New private and civic investors can also play a critical role. A consortium of philanthropies has already pooled resources through a $100 million New Economy Initiative. This could be a model for other investors to channel capital in a way that is patient, strategic and high-impact. Financial institutions could also work with the state and corporate, community and civic leaders in the city to create new financial instruments to crowd-fund resources for targeted and transparent investments.

For generations, Detroit has had a strong emotional pull on our nation—as the center of technological innovation in the early part of the 20th century, as the arsenal of democracy during World War II, and as a symbol of urban decline during the past 40 years. During a period of national drift and partisan discord, renewing Detroit—through economic growth, job creation and market transformation—could help renew our nation.

Authors

Americans are riveted by Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy—the largest in the country’s history. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Detroit emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr are engaged in a historic intervention with serious implications for Detroit’s citizens and businesses, pensioners and creditors. Yet they know that getting Detroit’s fiscal house in order—as difficult as that is—will not be sufficient to renew Detroit. Detroit needs a strong growth strategy to complement the state’s intervention on debt and deficits. Absent an economic revival, the city’s fiscal problems will be recurring and inescapable.

The good news, lost amidst the screaming headlines over bankruptcy, is that market momentum in Detroit’s core is real and palpable and provides a strong foundation for future growth. In fact, the broadly supported Detroit Future City plan provides an excellent blueprint for growth and investment. Now is not the time for investors outside Detroit merely to observe or monitor the dramatic intervention of the state and the bankruptcy process. Rather, this is the time to engage in a productive and creative fashion.

Like many American cities, Detroit has a strong core. Its 7.2 square miles, encompassing Downtown, Midtown, New Center and a handful of other neighborhoods in a city of 138 square miles, is seeing a surge of private and civic investment and business and residential growth. In this relatively small area of the city there are roughly 5,400 businesses, employing more than 135,000 workers. Add to that the 29,000 students at Wayne State University, and the numbers represent a remarkable opportunity to catalyze growth in businesses, the residential market and all that follows.

Market momentum, against all odds, is already apparent. The downtown is being transformed by Dan Gilbert, founder of mortgage provider Quicken Loans. In 2007, Gilbert moved the firm’s headquarters from suburban Farmington Hills to downtown Detroit. Since then, he has brought more than 7,000 employees downtown and purchased more than 15 buildings and two parking garages in the downtown area. The firm is now the third-largest landholder in the city of Detroit, behind the city government and General Motors. Gilbert’s purchases and building plans are all part of his Detroit 2.0 revival vision, “a lively live-work-play district in the heart of the city based around entrepreneurial companies in the digital economy.”

Gilbert’s acquisitions, of course, built on incomparable assets: The downtown is a National Register Historic District with more than 50 landmarked buildings.

Elsewhere, the Kresge Foundation contributed $50 million toward a major public-private reclamation and redevelopment project along the city’s riverfront.

Invest Detroit, the Detroit Downtown Partnership, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation have nurtured these deals and the broader revival for years.

Gilbert’s confidence has sparked decisions by other firms to expand their downtown presence and a new subculture of entrepreneurial tech-oriented start-ups, such as Digerati, Detroit Labs, and Stik, has emerged in the shadow of larger firms.

Similarly, Sue Mosey, president of the community development organization Midtown Detroit Inc., is leading a revival of that neighborhood driven by four major anchor institutions—Henry Ford Hospital, the Detroit Medical Center, Wayne State University, and the College for Creative Studies. Over the past decade, Mosey and a dedicated network of institutional partners have helped drive $1.8 billion in public and private investment in midtown.

Highlights include the following:

Henry Ford Hospital recently finished a $300 million renovation and in 2010 announced a $1 billion expansion with commercial, retail, and housing space.

The Detroit Medical Center, employing about 3,000 physicians, has invested $850 million over the past several years, including a new heart hospital and an outpatient pediatric facility.

Wayne State University, the largest public research university in the city of Detroit, is building a $90 million biomedical research facility to link up with researchers at the Henry Ford Health System and is home to TechTown, a technology research center and business incubator.

The College for Creative Studies, one of the top design colleges in the world, expanded in 2008 with a $145 million redevelopment of the historic Argonaut Building (formerly General Motors’ first research and design studio).

The building of M1 Rail, a 3.3 mile light-rail line from downtown to Grand Boulevard at the upper edge of Midtown Detroit, is the latest infusion of capital into the community. A consortium of public, private, and philanthropic institutions—including General Motors and Chrysler, the Kresge Foundation, and major individual backers such as Dan Gilbert, Roger Penske (the CEO of Penske Racing), and Peter Karmanos (the CEO of Compuware)—have committed more than $100 million to construction of the project.

In January 2013, the federal government contributed $25 million to the rail project, an act made possible only after the state authorized Detroit Regional Transit Authority was created. As U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said on making the announcement, “Nobody in America, no community, has ever raised $100 million for a project like this. That is unprecedented.... They’ve done everything we’ve asked them to do.”

That underscores that the federal government should also be a partner—not a leader, not a savior, but a partner—in the revival of the Motor City. It has a stake in the success of the city, because it invests in the city in large and small ways—through smart investments in people through the Earned Income Tax Credit, in universities and corporations through advanced research and development grants and contracts, and in businesses through SBA, Export-Import Bank and FHA loans.

City mismanagement and drift has meant that a small portion of federal funds (e.g., in Community Development Block Grants) have been either unspent or misallocated.

The federal government should move quickly to either shift responsibility for the allocation of these funds out of the city government and to a capable partner, like the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, which already handles most of the real estate development responsibilities for Detroit, or make funds more flexible, as the federal government generally does in the aftermath of natural disasters.

New private and civic investors can also play a critical role. A consortium of philanthropies has already pooled resources through a $100 million New Economy Initiative. This could be a model for other investors to channel capital in a way that is patient, strategic and high-impact. Financial institutions could also work with the state and corporate, community and civic leaders in the city to create new financial instruments to crowd-fund resources for targeted and transparent investments.

For generations, Detroit has had a strong emotional pull on our nation—as the center of technological innovation in the early part of the 20th century, as the arsenal of democracy during World War II, and as a symbol of urban decline during the past 40 years. During a period of national drift and partisan discord, renewing Detroit—through economic growth, job creation and market transformation—could help renew our nation.

Editor's Note: This piece was originally published by Huffington Post on July 4, 2013.

This Fourth of July, we are celebrating a new revolution -- a "Metropolitan Revolution." In the absence of constructive action in Washington, cities and metropolitan areas have emerged as the can-do directors of the nation, taking powerful steps to grow jobs and remake their economies for the long haul.

In metro areas across the country, public, private and civic leaders are helping workers get the skills they need, investing in infrastructure, and growing jobs through expanded trade and investment -- the hard work necessary to renew our economy.

With innovation the clear driver of economic growth, and federal funding at risk, metros like New York are building new innovative research institutions to invent and commercialize new ideas. With human capital vital to the success of firms and communities, metros like Chicago are overhauling their community college systems to ensure that students are trained for jobs that offer good wages and benefits. Metro areas are also looking around the world for markets for their products as 95 percent of the world's consumers are outside of America's borders.

This revolution has deep roots in American history. The American Revolution, for all intents and purposes, was an urban revolution. Cities were the epicenter of the succession of crises that rocked the colonies in the 1760s and 1770s.

The recession of 1763 was followed by a series of acts by the English Parliament that primarily hit urban populations by prohibiting them from doing business with other European powers and their colonies and imposing taxes on newspapers and diplomas (the infamous Stamp Act). Urban newspapers negatively affected by taxation encouraged protests in cities across the colonies. With each successive crisis, networks of leaders within and across cities began to grow and gain traction, leading the way toward the independence we celebrate today.

Of course, today's metropolitan revolutionaries are not aiming to tear down an old regime. They are, in practical American fashion, trying to build something positive of lasting value for places and people.

Yet that should not diminish what's happening. The metropolitan revolution has emerged in a period of deep economic crisis and political dissatisfaction that has sparked a fundamental reassessment of roles and responsibilities in our 21st century system. It is being led by networks of individuals who share a deep commitment to their communities and a sense of common purpose and vision. It is amplified by regular exposure to innovations in metros across the country and across the globe via means never dreamed of 250 years ago.

And it is a revolution with deep and profound consequences for our society and our governmental institutions.

This metropolitan revolution has only one logical conclusion: turning traditional U.S. power structures upside down. As metros lead, and states and the federal government follow.

Cities and metros are working to restructure the economy away from tantalizing illusion (endless consumption and irresponsible speculation) and back toward hard fundamentals: talent-fueled production and innovation. For a nation undergoing profound demographic transformation, the metropolitan model of education and social integration provides a path toward managing growth and diversity in a way benefits everyone. Cities and metros understand what the nation fitfully remembers and often contests: The United States is demographically blessed and this is our greatest competitive advantage and strength.

With cities and regions leading the way, the metropolitan revolution offers the United States our best chance to revive our national economy, reboot our national competitiveness, and restore purpose to our politics and civility to our debates.

Authors

Editor's Note: This piece was originally published by Huffington Post on July 4, 2013.

This Fourth of July, we are celebrating a new revolution -- a "Metropolitan Revolution." In the absence of constructive action in Washington, cities and metropolitan areas have emerged as the can-do directors of the nation, taking powerful steps to grow jobs and remake their economies for the long haul.

In metro areas across the country, public, private and civic leaders are helping workers get the skills they need, investing in infrastructure, and growing jobs through expanded trade and investment -- the hard work necessary to renew our economy.

With innovation the clear driver of economic growth, and federal funding at risk, metros like New York are building new innovative research institutions to invent and commercialize new ideas. With human capital vital to the success of firms and communities, metros like Chicago are overhauling their community college systems to ensure that students are trained for jobs that offer good wages and benefits. Metro areas are also looking around the world for markets for their products as 95 percent of the world's consumers are outside of America's borders.

This revolution has deep roots in American history. The American Revolution, for all intents and purposes, was an urban revolution. Cities were the epicenter of the succession of crises that rocked the colonies in the 1760s and 1770s.

The recession of 1763 was followed by a series of acts by the English Parliament that primarily hit urban populations by prohibiting them from doing business with other European powers and their colonies and imposing taxes on newspapers and diplomas (the infamous Stamp Act). Urban newspapers negatively affected by taxation encouraged protests in cities across the colonies. With each successive crisis, networks of leaders within and across cities began to grow and gain traction, leading the way toward the independence we celebrate today.

Of course, today's metropolitan revolutionaries are not aiming to tear down an old regime. They are, in practical American fashion, trying to build something positive of lasting value for places and people.

Yet that should not diminish what's happening. The metropolitan revolution has emerged in a period of deep economic crisis and political dissatisfaction that has sparked a fundamental reassessment of roles and responsibilities in our 21st century system. It is being led by networks of individuals who share a deep commitment to their communities and a sense of common purpose and vision. It is amplified by regular exposure to innovations in metros across the country and across the globe via means never dreamed of 250 years ago.

And it is a revolution with deep and profound consequences for our society and our governmental institutions.

This metropolitan revolution has only one logical conclusion: turning traditional U.S. power structures upside down. As metros lead, and states and the federal government follow.

Cities and metros are working to restructure the economy away from tantalizing illusion (endless consumption and irresponsible speculation) and back toward hard fundamentals: talent-fueled production and innovation. For a nation undergoing profound demographic transformation, the metropolitan model of education and social integration provides a path toward managing growth and diversity in a way benefits everyone. Cities and metros understand what the nation fitfully remembers and often contests: The United States is demographically blessed and this is our greatest competitive advantage and strength.

With cities and regions leading the way, the metropolitan revolution offers the United States our best chance to revive our national economy, reboot our national competitiveness, and restore purpose to our politics and civility to our debates.